Don't miss Bone this time around
By Diana Simmonds
Bone - Downstairs Theatre, Seymour Centre, September 19-October 13, 2007; ph: 9351 7940 or Ticketmaster.com.au
In 2006 the indie company Ride On produced Bone, by English playwright John Donnelly, at Darlinghurst Theatre. It was one of the most interesting plays of the year on the fringe side of Sydney theatre and featured a brilliant performance by Vanessa Downing.
It now returns as the third and final production in the Seymour Centre's BITE 07 season. BITE (best independent theatre) aims to give fresh air and new audiences to fringe work that deserves a wider audience. Often a fringe production - with minimal to zero marketing and publicity budgets - is virtually at the end of its run by the time word-of-mouth has built to the point of bringing in audiences. And many people are surprised and disappointed on discovering it's all over. That's where BITE comes in.
Bone puzzled some and enthralled many with the oblique story of Helen (Downing) who is contemplating suicide following the death of her farmer husband. It was no ordinary bucolic domestic drama, however. Propelling the personal was the political - the devastation caused to the British livestock industry by the 2002 foot & mouth epidemic. It highlighted the effects of such an event on the unwitting human victims - whose animals, income and raison d'etre are destroyed overnight by a disease whose deadly swift spread across the country were - and still are - the result of industrial procedures which go against all the rules of good animal husbandry.
Ironically it's something we are seeing at this very moment in Australia with the failure of quarantine s for the horse racing industry: equine influenza. And news from Britain today (September 13) tells of a fresh outbreak of foot & mouth just weeks after the one which followed the floods.
Bone is about the aspects we don't see on the news: the human cost of such events and, by the by, the costs on ordinary people of such adventures as the Iraq war and the breakdown of human relations. It's a rich and engrossing play and - as already mentioned - Vanessa Downing is worth the price of admission all by herself (and earned her a Sydney Theatre Awards nomination for Best Actress 2006). She is backed up, however, by two excellent actors: Ryan Hayward and Peter Barry, and directed by Tanya Goldberg.
