Friday March 29, 2024
Holiday
Review

Holiday

February 22 2009

Holiday, Ranters Theatre with Griffin at SBW Stables Theatre, February 4-28; phone: (02) 8002 4772 or www.griffintheatre.com.au

Holidays, like death, divorce and moving house, can be the most miserable things we do. Yet we persist. We trek through Nepal or up Kilimanjaro, get altitude sickness and hate every minute. We climb on bicycles and struggle through foreign countryside where the locals smile and despise our efforts. We lie around in horizon pools, on massage tables and on perfect white beaches with tooth-aching boredom oozing from every pore. Or we shuffle around museums and art galleries trying to glimpse the Renaissance treasures over the heads of tour groups of obese Floridians. On top of that, holidays most often take place among various groupings of total strangers. This involves more stress because the rules of holidays require being nice to one another, chatting like old friends, flirting and generally behaving in quite contradictory ways to "normal" life. Ah holidays! Why?

There is plenty of time to let such thoughts and questions meander around your mind in Holiday because its Godot-ish style invites rumination and flights of fancy in the pauses and digressions that punctuate its rhythmic progress to nowhere in particular. Written by Raimondo Cortese and directed by his brother Adriano, Holiday is 90 minutes of theatre thatclearly divides audiences. I'm in the Love It camp.

The play is performed – and credited as "co-devised" – by Paul Lum and Patrick Moffatt. Their performances are deceptive: so subtle as to suggest no performance at all. But the two actually deliver two superb and enthralling portraits of ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances – trying to make human contact in the stultifying atmosphere of a holiday.

They edge around each other with polite inquiry and offerings of conversational gambits. Neither is particularly interesting, nor particularly interested, but they keep trying in an amiable if desultory way. They might be waiting for someone or something; they could be wondering why they are the only holidaymakers around – it's impossible to guess and no hints are offered. (Cortese has said he was inspired by the sight of westerners sunning themselves as if nothing had happened on south east Asian beaches days after the Boxing Day tsunami.)

Perhaps that's the thing: normalcy where normalcy isn't supposed to exist. Who knows. Humour and poignancy abound in the 90 minutes of real time poolside behaviour. They say, observe and think things that most of us will recognise and wince or chuckle at. The piece is quaint, weird, confounding, uncompromising and yet delightfully human and affecting. It's a work of imagination and daring: go with it or bail out.

Holiday

The Stables theatre is painted white throughout, with a paddling pool and two inflatable beach balls as the only – and striking – furniture (design Anna Tregloan). The anonymous brightness is emphasised by a triangular tubular grid slung from the ceiling with simple white and blue lights to heighten or soften the effect from time to time (lighting Niklas Pajanti); while colour and place are actually conjured up by David Franzke's soundscape. These three make an integral and significant contribution to the success of Holiday, and, having barely seen nor heard of them before, Tregloan and Pajanti are also responsible for Venus and Adonis at Wharf 2 right now.

Aside from not being everyone's cup of tea, disappointment may have arisen for some in the audience (particularly four lemon-lipped young gays who walked out the evening I was there) because it's listed thus: "Griffin is delighted that Holiday is presented as part of the 2009 New Mardi Gras Festival." This, plus the fact that the cast is two men, probably led them to think they were in for a tropical bonkathon and a couple of buff bods. Instead they got – or in their case didn't get – one of the most engaging plays in a long time.

PS: the playscript is published and available at the Stables bar for $10 and, unlike many plays, is well worth reading.

 

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