If I Needed Someone

The Living Room really is a living room. Hidden up a steep staircase on the first floor of an old terrace in Elizabeth Street, it is one of two rooms that have been converted to a workshop space – or in this case, an intimate theatre space. One room becomes a welcoming foyer, the other the bedroom set of the Australian première of Neil LaBute’s very tense, very provocative play If I Needed Someone.

The room is comfortably furnished, the bed neatly made, the floor strangely strewn with record albums. There is a fireplace on one wall. Three curtained windows overlook the street on another; two doorways open off the third. The fourth wall is literally that! A wide archway where a small audience, 22 at the most, eavesdrop on a tense, personal, exasperating, frustrating conversation/altercation between a relatively newly met couple in the bedroom of her apartment.

LaBute is a master of natural dialogue. Tight, economic, realistic, including pauses, half-finished sentences, interruptions, hesitations, suggestive responses, inferences … And the misunderstandings they can cause, especially in the beginning of a relationship. Add issues of personal space, consent, limitations and expectations and you have what director/performer Kai Paynter describes as “a sharp-tongued tour of desire, power-plays and modern relational minefields.”

Making such an intimate and confusing situation credible is a challenge for the director and the actors. Doing both is even more problematic – but Paynter pulls it off in a performance that makes her character, Jules, wary, damaged, spikey, accusatory … as well as lonely and afraid. The edginess, quick reactions, complete changes of mood and attitude must be so hard to sustain – and yet she sustains them so convincingly that her unpredictability is as difficult for the audience to comprehend as it is for Jim, the man whom she has invited to her home.

Joshua Long makes Jim as patient as could be possible in a situation from which it would be very easy to walk away! His attraction to Jules is obvious. She is pretty, vibrant, intelligent. He has noticed her before – and welcomed her approach at the party where they met. And he accepts, almost from the moment they enter the apartment, that he shouldn’t expect to stay the night. What he doesn’t expect is her complexity and caution – which throws him time after time. And yet he goes back! He listens, tries to show he understands, tries to explain his feelings, almost gives up, but perseveres. Once again, not an easy role – especially as the dialogue is so fast, disjointed, emotional, and the changes in mood so random.

Both performers make LaBute’s 90-minute treatise to the complications that can occur in burgeoning relationships in contemporary society into precarious “tightrope walk” … albeit one that, he seems to suggest, can be negotiated with understanding, and patience, and trust.

Sydney will see If I Needed Someone again and again over the years – but perhaps never as contained or personal or as consuming as in this intimate little space with such tight direction and such intense acting.

Carol Wimmer

Photographer: Christopher Kakoliris @christopherkakoliris