Zebra
ZEBRA, Wharf 1, Sydney Theatre Company March 10-April 30 2011; photos: Brett Boardman
ROSS MUELLER’S new play is a curious beast, and it has nothing to do with the stripy equus quagga; well very little – despite the clumsy explanation of the title that occurs during the play, it’s more a red herring. Zebra is a character study, a romance, a skewed bromance, a love letter to New York, a rail against the GFC and somehow everything and nothing in between.
The play begins with the set: a superbly rendered and uncannily realistic New York Irish bar. You can almost smell the stale Guinness and melancholic blarney in film designer David McKay’s STC debut. Up the steps, beyond the grimy window, it’s winter 2009 and the GFC has the city and the country’s imagination in its grip. For Robinson, the bar’s owner (Nadine Garner), the unthinkable has happened: not only has her husband died and left her to cope as best she can, but the bar is going broke. Customers have evaporated along with their discretionary spending; even the small change needed for a beer chaser.
Enter Larry (Colin Friels) a 57-year-old businessman who’s supposed to be meeting his daughter’s fiancé for the first time, at her request, so he can approve her choice. Described in the commissioning company’s blurb as a “midlife crisis comedy” there is indeed a fair amount of snappy one-liner comedy in the opening skirmish between Robinson and Larry. She is outraged that he’s walked into her bar, changed her jukebox music (Springsteen) and in her absence out the back, helped himself to whiskey. He is instantly flirtatious and irrepressible, buoyed up and sexy courtesy the millions made, and not lost, in the dot-com boom of blessed memory.
Again, according to the STC blurb, the playwright is “a writer whose work is characterised by an acute sense of urgency and distinct contemporaneity”. You need to know this because it’s not immediately apparent from the play itself. It’s oddly flaccid and predictable, even though graced by two fine actors in Friels and Garner who, in normal circumstances, can inject urgency and contemporaneity into virtually anything. Director Lee Lewis likewise: it’s hard to see how she could have done better with the piece without extensive dramaturgy and much rewriting and focusing (as opposed to re-focusing – there’s little evidence of focus having been there in the first place). If extensive dramaturgy and rewrites already happened prior to the start of rehearsals, then the play was either stuffed up in the process or was irretrievably confused in the first place.
After Friels and Garner have raised our hopes and interest for a bit with their often exquisite fencing and discrete personal emotional roller-coasters, (think a touch of Frankie and Johnnie in the Clair de Lune) the play goes off on the trail of another genre (buddies, bromance) with the arrival of the fiancé, Jimmy. No ordinary fiancé however. Rather than the manageable young hunk expected by Larry, Jimmy is a washed up Australian-via-California real estate salesman and only three years younger than his prospective father-in-law. He’s also played by Brian Brown and that should warn anyone who’s not been asleep at the movies for the past decade or so that this means trouble.
Brown is a force of nature in Australian film and theatre and, as he gets older, he resembles more and more one of those handsome, gnarled forest giants of the Tarkine, or wherever, around which everyone dances and pays homage. Larry is appalled at the idea of his little girl marrying this ancient, washed up relic; Jimmy wants only to convince his adversary that he’s worth investing in – if the daughter/fianceé is going to live happy ever after. The wrangle between the two is long and more like a pair of old bull elephants stumbling and thumping around rather than young stallion, old stallion (the zebra reference). At some point the too-long sidelined Robinson threatens to take to them with a baseball bat if they don’t stop their malarkey – and not before time.
The GFC and its aftermath is fertile ground for writers of all kinds: so much human drama, tragedy, adventure, disaster and fascination. Some of this is nibbled at and poked about in the script, but nothing is fully grasped. Or if it is, it’s dropped when another juicy morsel of idea happens by. And we all know what happened to the dog with the bone: he ended up with no bone at all. In this instance, Zebra is a collection of bones that finally don’t make a coherent skeleton. The sheer length of the play – an hour and 45 minutes – is a clue as to why this might be.
Cut to 90 minutes and ruthlessly focused towards one theme or the other, it could be a relatively plot-free but rich character study – the unlikely yet ultimately charming romance between Robinson and Larry would get my vote. The GFC and the two macho posturers don’t do it for me at all; these two topics need to be handled toughly and must go somewhere original. In this instance these two old farts go nowhere fast. They’re neither menacing nor sufficiently funny. Poignancy and resonance reside in Robinson’s character and, as Larry becomes the one who connects with her, it’s where the play comes to life.
Neither Friels nor Brown have been on a Sydney stage in more than a decade and we don’t see Nadine Garner that often either. They are variously sublime performers: Friels oozes craggy sex appeal and a knowingness about his character/himself that’s an absorbing delight. Garner invests Robinson with soul and feisty allure. For Brian Brown – see above. It’s a pity they’ve returned to the stage with such an unsatisfactory play. It’s an even greater pity that more ruthless work wasn’t carried out on it first.
