Hammerhead (is dead)
Hammerhead (is dead) by Nick Coyle, Bambina Borracha Productions at the SBW Stables Theatre, January 9-31, 2009; www.griffintheatre.com or (02) 8002 4772
Good ideas are not as common as we might like and Nick Coyle has a lot of them. In his new play Hammerhead (is dead) he is profligate with good ideas and good lines and there are glimmers of promise in this production.
The first good idea is to portray, in a full-on 90 minutes, the few moments before death when, we are told, your life (and perhaps your dreams and nightmares) flash before your eyes. The second good idea is to assemble a creative team of a passionately committed producer (Amanda Pulsford), and designers (sound: Steve Toulmin, lighting, Brent Forstrom-Jones, set Colleen Reeks, costumes Amanda Testa). The third good idea is a cast of four of the best up and coming actors yet to have broken through to the mainstream: Charlie Garber, Anna Houston, Brynn Loosemoreand Gus Murray.
As Hammerhead, the boy who is dying (a nasty accident caused by his sister) Loosemore is the solid, innocent centre of a storm of wild characters, wilder situations, flights of fancy and surreal nonsense conjured by Coyle’s freewheeling script and imagination and four stunning performances.
Houston doubles as Hammerhead’s little sister and a fantasy figure – Mindy – who may or may not be a sophisticated woman on a cruise liner or could also be a lunatic figment of his dying hallucinations. She is strong as either and anchors her elements of the play with great conviction.
Garber’s role as Jones – possibly a beachcomber, or a relic of a forgotten war or just simply a nutcase with invisible friends and a nasty mind – is also totally convincing. By playing the insanity with unaffected clarity, he somehow avoids caricature while all the while making it quite clear that Jones is quite literally not all there.
As well as effective subsidiary characters (a ghost, a skeleton, a dog bred to resemble a cat) there is one other central character: Denny, who appears to be a Vietnam vet from the Deep South (USA, not Victoria). Gus Murray brings crazed military brio and testosterone to the role while also imbuing his lost but angry soldier with some unexpected pathos.
Unexpected pathos was in abundance on opening night as a predominantly stony-faced audience watched these fine actors bring so much to the stage and so much more than the script, in its current incarnation, deserves. Aside from the predictable claque of dutiful chucklers (family and lovers of members of the team) there was unfortunately little to laugh at aside from four good lines. By half way through the rather long 90-odd minutes even the claque was silent, however, and some were left to wonder why two other good ideas hadn’t occurred to anyone in authority.
These two ideas are: get someone else – preferably very experienced – to direct the play and don’t let the playwright do it himself. (Usually a bad idea anyway and with this kind of ambitious, unformed and amorphous script: essential.) And the second good idea would have been for that someone in authority to say: okay Nick, you have talent, no doubt about that, but this script isn’t ready for the stage. It’s full of good stuff but it needs to be refined, crafted, focused and refined and when you’ve done that it should be crafted and focused all over again.
Poo-pooing traditional craft skills and rules is all very well, but in order to chuck them out the window, you actually need to have mastered those skills and rules (viz Joe Orton for instance). If you don’t know your ABCs in the first place, you can’t actually invent a new way of writing.
Garber, Houston, Loosemore and Murray are terrific and should be snapped up or at least noted by other producers, tout suite. The same goes for production photographer Cybele Malinowski whose work for this show is terrific.
