Saturday March 30, 2024
The Nightwatchman
Review

The Nightwatchman

March 25 2007

There is none so blind as those who will not see ... might be the subtitle of Daniel Keene’s 2005 play. The Nighwatchman is about an elderly blind man, Bill, (William Zappa) whose two adult children Michael (Alex Dimitriades) and Helen (Camilla Ah Kin), suffer from limited inner vision. These two have reluctantly come together to assist their father clear out of their childhood home and once beloved garden as he prepares to move (even more reluctantly) into an old people's home.

While the three wrangle and ramble around themes of memory, the past, loneliness, death and love, a lot of red wine is drunk and old scabs picked at. It is, for the most part, elegantly done in a curious mix of naturalism and formality, pretension and poetry. This style, including references to Monet and his garden at Giverny, must have something to do with the play's original language - French - and that it was first performed in France.

Keene's work is seen in that country more often than it is in Sydney. During the play's many moody moments of longueurs and ennui one almost inevitably muses on what it is about Melbourne that causes one of its most prominent playwrights and its tourism authority to yearn so constantly for Paris that the former prefers to work there and the latter spends millions trying to convince us that Melbourne is our Paris. Most odd.

The family in their very Parisian garden - all black cinders and melancholy - are by no means odd. Helen yearns for the childhood through which - she learns from her brother - she often sleepwalked. Michael struggles with slowly discovering that his job - photography - is something he may no longer have the vision to pursue. All the while their father refuses their regrets and backwards glances.

"Only a fool breaks his heart over what is gone," he says, in a rather savage and otherwise unsupported broadside at nostalgia. However, he does observe - with scorching accuracy - of a neighbour: "Floor tiles! How can a man spend his life selling floor tiles?"

The Nightwatchman

The Nightwatchman is, if it's about anything, a study of ordinariness and how irritating that can be. (Helen can't stay longer because she is a doctor's receptionist and he won't like being inconvenienced.) Old Bill has a more vivid existence than either of his children despite blindness. (He talks to his dead wife and she is obviously more alive to him than his boring if well-meaning kids.)

The production is deftly directed by Lee Lewis and Zappa brings much-needed lightness of touch to his grumpy old man, while the other two have a harder time of their essentially one-dimensional characters. If you yearn for the Paris end of Collins Street, you'll probably enjoy this gloomy study of portentous nothingness; if, on the other hand, you enjoy Melbourne just as it is, you might find yourself wondering what the point might be. And that may well be the point. Je ne sais pas. And, frankly, je ne care pas.

The Nightwatchman, SBW Stables Theatre, to April 14; ph: 1300 306 776 or www.griffintheatre.com.au

 

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