Friday March 29, 2024
Age of Consent
Review

Age of Consent

August 1 2008

Age of Consent, Tamarama Rock Surfers at the Old Fitzroy; Juy 22-23 august, 2008; phone 1300 438 98349 or www.rocksurfers.org

ENGLISH playwright Peter Morris wrote this two-hander at the turn of the century and it was first staged in the UK in 2001. It’s director Shannon Murphy’s second excellent pick and work this year, after the marvellous My Name is Rachel Corrie (B Sharp).

Murphy has antennae finely tuned to searching out scripts of intense drama and social relevance; and then does a fine job with the plays and her actors. Age of Consent is a tremendous follow-on from the first play, not least because it is completely different yet has similar qualities of ferocious honesty and an uncompromising approach to subject matter.

Age of Consent, like Rachel Corrie, has stirred predictable but nevertheless depressing responses from talkback-land: the jerking of knees and the splutter of fulmination and self righteous ignorance was temporarily deafening for both productions (for ostensibly different reasons but actually caused in the main by pig ignorance, which never stopped anyone).

Apparently the play has hit the same nerve that caused the Henson/Art Monthly Australia furore and concerns the spectre of child abuse and its alleged glorification by art and artists. How any reasonable person could deduce this from Age of Consent is beyond imagining.

The play is actually about perceptions of abuse versus the reality of abuse. It neither condones nor condemns, but simply explores and it is powerful, compelling and extremely entertaining. In the glamour corner is Stephanie Dunn (Caroline Kemp), single mother of Raquel, a six-year-old nymphet who bears some resemblance to JonBenet Ramsey, the American “beauty queen” who was murdered by persons unknown in the basement of her family home in Denver, Colorado in 1996.

In the grungy corner is Timmy (Ivan Donato) a young man incarcerated for a crime that bears some resemblance to the murder in Liverpool in 1993 of toddler Jamie Bulger by two 10-year-olds. So far, so do not take literally.

In the talented hands of Kemp and Donato, Stephanie and Timmy spring to disturbing, thought-provoking life as each in turn takes the audience into their confidence as the stories unfold. Stephanie – streetwise, ambitious, but painfully naive – believes she is doing the best for her irritatingly uncooperative daughter (who willfully mucks up an otherwise triumphant audition for Les Miz after a small triumph in a Basingstoke pantomime).

Age of Consent

Unrelated in space and time, but intertwined by way of cause and effect, Timmy gradually reveals wittingly and otherwise that he committed a terrible crime as a child, for which he is now being punished, but cannot explain either to himself or anyone else.

On the surface, first instincts are to be appalled by the one-time child killer whose actions must surely be the most profound abuse of all: murder. As the 70 minute turn-and-turn-about drama begins to reveal itself, a different story emerges and it’s one that has no easy conclusion, no pat answers and precious little “closure” in terms of figuring it all out. In other words: that’s life.

In the end which is the more abusive action: for a child to kill another child for reasons the assailant cannot articulate or understand? Or for an adult or number of adults to knowingly and deliberately harm a child for reasons they don’t care to articulate or understand?

And as we live in a society that condones or ignores the mass murder of children, the mass starvation of children and which pays lip service to child support, education and health but in reality condemns millions of kids to poverty, starvation and no education at all, who are the real abusers and what is abuse?

Age of Consent is not a scandal, it is a profoundly moral play which offers great complexity beneath its highly entertaining surface. In their different ways Kemp and Donato deliver two of the best performances we have seen in Sydney this year and the production is a cracker with a simple, painted wedge-shaped set (Rita Carmony) good lighting plot (Matt Schubach) and sound (Steve Toulmin).

Shannon Murphy is already marked as a rising star in a field of many clay-footed clodhoppers and pretenders. With this play she has showcased two equally exciting talents in Caroline Kemp and Ivan Donato and it would be good to see the production into a second life, perhaps in the Seymour Centre’s BITE season. Meanwhile: get on down to the Fitz and see it now.

 

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