Saturn's Return
Saturn’s Return by Tommy Murphy, Wharf 2 Sydney Theatre Company; August 15-30, 2008; (02) 9250 1777 or www.sydneytheatre.com.au
TRANSIT of Venus or Saturn’s return, these planetary happenings have exercised the human imagination for as long as stories and drama have been enjoyed. Tommy Murphy is the latest to hang a human story off the idea of how Saturn affects the human psyche when it makes its periodic close swing by Earth.
Whether you believe in the astrological aspect or not is hardly the point for Saturn’s Return because it’s really about the circuitous route we take on the way to growing up, or growing bored or not growing up at all; the differences between male and female and the way relationships grow, die or change.
Billy Wilder made a comedy of manners on a similar topic in 1955 with The Seven Year Itch. In it Marilyn Monroe was the spectacular free-spirited next-door neighbour whose gorgeousness and joie de vivre intoxicate and tempt Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell). He is the classic staid man in a grey flannel suit whose family fortuitously – or fatefully – leave him at home while they leave New York for the summer. In 1955 being unfaithful and extra-marital dalliances were spoken of in hushed and horrified tones; and even daydreaming about “The Girl” (Monroe’s depersonalized character name) was risque.
Has life changed that much? In Saturn’s Return it’s Zara (Leanna Wallsman) who has the itch rather than Matt (Matt Zeremes), her partner of close to eight years. Is she over it or just bored? It’s debatable whether she really knows herself, even her restless sexual outrageousness (let’s do it now, let’s do a threesome, let’s do it on the stairs) has an irritable suggestion of routine to it.
Matt is up for anything but there is a hint of deference and timidity that signals he is trying to keep up with her – and keep her – rather than be wholeheartedly engaged in the adventures. She confuses him even more than she confuses herself. And when her old primary school friend Brendan (Socratis Otto) comes on the scene the patterns of contact, communication and meaning become even more scrambled.
The play is set in Zara and Matt’s apartment (they don’t need a backyard) where cardboard cartons, textas and sticky paper have recently been used to make a spaceship for a visiting small nephew. The lovingly decorated spaceship is actually more real and substantial than their apartment and Zara’s response to it is telling: she rips it to shreds in a violent refusal of what it symbolises.
David Berthold directs the trio in this robust, funny, complex and delicate depiction of life at a crucial moment: when we suddenly figure out it isn’t a rehearsal. Thirty is a great age for a woman and also a scary one. This is visibly dawning on Zara through the play and her independent erotic power is palpable and exciting even as her inner doubts and impatience with the men add an unsettled and unsettling layer to her. Walsmann is tremendous in the role.
As the two men in her life Zeremes and Otto are also excellent in understanding their tricky situation. Matt and Brendan are in the position most men find difficult or incomprehensible: they are passive to her aggressive, reactors rather than initiators and, as a consequence, their erections rise and fall comically in response to their unusual predicament.
This is not a spa bath drama however (that being the 21st century up market version of the kitchen sink drama), Saturn’s Return is fantastical and theatrical, bold in its reach and language with a kind of Lost in Translation look and feel in its edgy-living alienation. Adam Gardnir’s design with sound by Basil Hogios and Luiz Pampolha’s lighting make a SurroundSound epic of an intimate piece and the overall effect is punchy, funny and sad.
One scene where Matt goes to Amsterdam and hooks up with a prostitute (also played by Walsmann) is a curiosity and seems to belong in a longer and bigger play, or not at all. That aside, Tommy Murphy continues to prove himself to be one of the best playwrighting minds at work right now and Saturn’s Return is exhilarating.
