Saturday March 30, 2024
Sydney Ghost Stories
Review

Sydney Ghost Stories

December 2 2009

Sydney Ghost Stories Old Fitzroy Theatre, Woolloomooloo, 25 November - 19 December 2009.

Ghost stories are rife at this time of year; maybe it’s Halloween and the hysteria whooped up by Hollywood over ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night – especially at the box office.

Sydney’s latest Ghost Stories are same same but different. All take place in the already creepy black box of the Old Fitzroy and consist of six short plays by different Australian writers – and all written for this project. The scene is set in a quasi-historical introduction performed by Jamie McGregor that gives way to the first piece: a two-hander by Toby Schmitz, directed by Dean Carey, that tells The Point of the Story. It’s a tongue-in-cheek, approximately eight minutes played with a nicely light but convinced touch by Jeneffa Soldatic and Matthew Walker. The premise is that we all know or have known a killer – whether we know it or not.

Ibis by Lachlan Philpott is a very Sydney story about real estate – the getting of it. Unfortunately for the purchasing couple, Joe Manning and Soldatic again with agent input from Catherine Terracini, the des res is blighted by the presence in the backyard of mysteriously increasing numbers of Ibis. For me, as Hon. Gen. Sec. of the We Hate Ibis Society, the playlet, directed by Anthony Skuse, was creepier than most conventional ghost stories; and the less said about this nod to Hitchcock’s The Birds, the better I’ll sleep.

The third play of the half dozen is Ghosties by Verity Laughton, again directed by Dean Carey. Two young men break into an old house for a vodka-fuelled night of trying to scare each other witless. Jamie Irvine joins Matthew Walker for this one, which features a more conventional creepy soundtrack and the effects of the imagination on the possible presence of the supernatural.A sexual element is also threaded through the “oooo-aaaah, he’s behind you” story and the result is both over-complicated and simplistic.

These three are a reminder that short plays are as difficult and demanding to craft as a short story – and short does not mean a fragment of something longer, or something that should be longer crammed into ten minutes. As with a lot of short plays, aside from the excellent work of the actors and directors, the best that can be said of them is that they’re over quickly and there’s something else to look forward to. In this case it’s an interval.

After the break, the meat and potatoes of the night are delivered. Tobsha Learner and director Kay Alexander fashion an entertaining 30 minutes, or thereabouts, in the company of a Goth rock star, his manager and his bass player; and an outsider who clearly doesn’t belong as she’s the only one dressed in white. Black Wedding is set in Mortuary Station and the title tells you pretty much what it’s about.

Sydney Ghost Stories

Irvine, Soldatic, Terracini and Walker make the most of good, meaty characters and sharp dialogue, but the raison d’etre and twist are immediately obvious, so something else needed to be added to make plausible the inability of the principals to figure it all out and avoid several repetitions of not very much. Either a cut or an additional plot device is required. It’s fun, however, and Mortuary Station has never seemed less inviting.

Rebecca Clarke contributes Escape Pod to the Ghost Stories evening. In it she explores the secret world of the child – instantly recognisable as the kind who knows or senses things that disconcert and terrify parents. Is it imagination or have the home renovations disturbed something more than plaster dust?

Directed by Glenn Fraser and performed by McGregor, Manning and Terracini, Escape Pod is disconcerting, but like the rest of the bill, “terrifying” it is not. This is not really a criticism. Personally, I’m not in favour of mucking about with things we don’t know anything or enough about. It’s a bit like playing with matches or fireworks: someone is bound to get hurt.

The night wraps up, appropriately, with the best work. Act 2 by Stephen Sewell, directed by Katy Alexander and performed by Manning, Soldatic, Terracini and Walker, is genuinely disturbing and, at the end of a long(ish) evening of reasonable entertainment, it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. It’s not because Sewell has done anything creepy, ghostly or otherworldly – just the opposite. In truth, it’s actually the most earth-bound of the six, yet the playwright has listened so keenly to the way people speak to one another, how we hide our true thoughts from one another and ourselves – it’s unnerving; as if the playwright has eavesdropped on the unspoken. He has captured how people relate, think they relate, cease to relate and finally, hate to relate, and he has fashioned a gem of human stuff that shines in this setting – and would shine in any other too. A genuine Wow! to end the night.

 

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