Yellow Moon

The stage is bare, but for four benches.  The slats of one bench curve up like horns – or branches.  In the course of the show these benches will be, in the audience’s imagination, simply benches, but also beds, the side of a snow-covered mountain, a forest, a deer, a window into a mansion and the edge of a lake at dawn.  There are no props and yet, in the course of the story, there are knives, guns, cooking utensils, varieties of food and drink, and old vinyl record turntables – all mimed with perfect clarity by the cast.  So powerful are these creations that, toward the end, when it looks as if a character is about to die from a gunshot, there was a collective gasp from the audience.  The audience, by the way, is ranged in tiers either side of the playing space.  As the show proceeds, both sides forget the other is there and both sides feel they are missing nothing.  Director Leticia Cáceres fills her stage with seamless transitions, movement, energy and pace.  In this sense alone, Yellow Moon is excellent; this is direction that is both highly skilled and yet totally at the service of the story and the drama.

There are four actors, all dressed in daggy, everyday clothes – despite the fact that two of them play multiple characters and all of them take turns in narrating the action.  Yes, David Greig exploits modern theatre’s looser parameters by having each actor drop out of character to tell a bit of backstory or explain what someone is feeling – often at odds with what they say they’re feeling.  The narration works because it is pointed, funny and wry.

These actors are well up to the demands placed on them by all this.  Beautiful Naomi Rukavina, as a repressed, self-harming Muslim girl, ‘Silent Leila’, can, however, seem rather too repressed and so sound a little flat.  Luke Ryan’s protagonist ‘Stag Lee’, is supposed to be a ‘bad boy’ (truant, thief, pornographer, would-be pimp) and he gets the posture and the smartarse, aggressive confidence right.  But he does look much too nice, really, to be a dangerous ‘bad boy’ even if, as the story proceeds, his Lee is revealed as not such a bad boy after all.  Mark Constable delivers two very different but threatening characters with great presence – one a menacing brute, the other a melancholy solitary behind a stony front.  As for Daniela Farinacci, has she ever given a bad performance?  Here, her turn as ‘Holly’, a talentless motor-mouth television personality, as repressed in her own way as ‘Silent Leila’, is a hoot and a delight.

Yellow Moon is on the VCE theatre studies and drama playlist – hence the fact that three quarters of our audience were (rather sophisticated) school kids.  Don’t let the fact that it’s ‘for schools’ put you off, but if I have a small reservation about this production it has to be with the play itself.  The story, as a story per se, is familiar – that is, as any genre piece – and here it’s ‘mismatched teenagers on the run’ after a violent crime, the characters they meet on their flight and their discovery of themselves and each other.  Playwright Greig has said that ‘he went in hard to keep kids watching’.  Judging by our audience (and it seems, audiences in Mr Greig’s native Scotland, USA, Norway, Korea, Germany and here in a 2009 Red Stitch production) he has succeeded: our audience was enthralled. 

Nevertheless, the play does sometimes feel as if Mr Greig made it up as he went along.  His ideas are great, but the progression between them can feel arbitrary – or cheerfully melodramatic.  One could mount the defence that it’s all ‘thematically linked’, but the text doesn’t do too much with Lee’s suicidal mother, or the fact that Leila is a Muslim (on the contrary) who self harms, and it just drops the aforesaid Holly once she’s served her turn.  One character departs completely from the narrative to tell an anecdote about himself that hasn’t much to do with anything – a sequence that comes close to derailing the story’s very necessary momentum.  ‘Comes close’, but doesn’t.  The cast and Ms Cáceres' superb direction – supported by Melanie Liertz’ design and costumes, Lisa Mibus’ lighting and Peter Goodwin’s sound design – carries the day (or night).  It’s a truly ‘theatrical’ experience.

Michael Brindley

Image: Luke Ryan (Lee) and Naomi Rukavina (Leila). Photo © Jeff Busby.