Friday March 29, 2024
The Seed
Review

The Seed

July 27 2007

The Seed, Downstairs Belvoir St, July 19-August 12, 2007; ph: (02) 9699 3444 or www.belvoir.com.au

Kate Mulvany is a remarkable talent, both as an actor - dramatic and comic - and as a playwright. And she's a talent whose maturity and stature are to be seen in sharp focus with this new play, her tenth.

The Seed is a biographical work in which she tells her own story and those of her father and grandfather. So far so unremarkable and so what? Well, pretty remarkable actually because even the most superficial synopsis ought to make your hair stand on end.

Danny was a young Irish immigrant to Perth. He was conscripted and sent to Vietnam. There he did his duty, innocently inhaled Agent Orange and eventually came home to Australia, none the wiser. Six years later, married and getting on with his life, Kate was born. By that time Danny was experiencing unexplained rashes, sweats, panic attacks and his other Vietnam vet mates were reporting similar souvenirs. Worse still, the family was soon to discover that baby Kate had been born with cancerous kidneys and bleak prospects.

In lesser hands The Seed could so easily have been any combination of moralistic, self-aggrandising, self-pitying and sentimental, but Mulvany is anything but a lesser being. The play opens with her character - now 30 and an unrelentlingly stickybeaked journalist named Rosie - is on an uneasy pilgrimage to Nottingham with her father to visit her grandfather for the first time. Very early on, Rosie tells the audience, sharply (lest we make the mistake of pitying her or harbouring maudlin thoughts) that she is not a victim, she's a legacy. It's an interesting and crucial difference and should pull up anyone tempted to descend into a bathetic response to a truly terrible story.

But, as has already been said, Mulvany is special. She is deliciously unpredictable and courageous and The Seed is gaspingly funny in parts (as in - gasp, then laugh) and droll when it's not dropping life's little truths and lies like mortar bombs in the path of the unwary. Danny (Danny Adcock) is a man who was damaged and saddened long before Vietnam; this becomes obvious the moment he and his daughter walk in to his one-time family home in Nottingham. Brian - Da' or Gran da', drop the hated English "d" or be sorry - is an ostensibly charming old man whose days are spent drinking whiskey and reminiscing about his youthful exploits as an IRA activist. Martin Vaughan makes a compelling charming old bully of Gran da'. Gradually the charm drops away, however, and the bully and liar take centre stage, mesmerising his unfortunate younger son and at once fascinating and repelling his grand-daughter.

The Seed

Iain Sinclair directs the trio in a measured, intelligent reading of the play. It has the effect of heightening the emotional content while cooling any possibility of an over-wrought tragi-comedy. This is as well because there is much in the truths of the stories that could be sent right over the top into the realms of the far fetched. Not because it's unreal, but because it is only too real. (It would take a fevered imagination to make up such scenarios.)

The Seed won Mulvany the 2004 Philip Parsons Young Playwrights Award commission and it was money well spent and time well taken. Designer Micka Agosta and lighting designer Chris Twynamhave turned the downstairs theatre into a perfectly awful representation of an old man's living room with elements of the 1940s (the tiled fireplace), 60s (the sofa) and 80 years of memories and lies cluttering the rest of the space. What is gradually revealed in the ratty old room affects each - father, son, daughter and grand-daughter - in ways that cannot be anticipated at the beginning of the journey and it's never less than enthralling, compelling, awful and seriously funny.

The Seed is probably the best new Australian theatre work of 2007 - a reasonable bet given that's there's not a lot of the year left for a rival to emerge. And this production is a rewarding one for all kinds of reasons that need to be experienced to be believed and understood.

 

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