TINDERBOX
TINDERBOX, Tredwood Productions at Theatre 19, Darlinghurst Theatre, 4-27 January 2013. Photos by Patrick Boland; main: Nastassja Djalog, Alan Lovell and Benjamin Ross; right: Benjamin Ross.
THIS TIME of year - high summer - is a spookily apposite and dramatic moment to premiere a play about fire in Australia. Playwright Alana Valentine didn't have that in mind when she began her exploration of it, however, and - like the rest of us - is as freshly startled by the extreme heat and flaring danger that the season so often brings. It's an unpleasant and often fatal surprise, year after year, and that's why this play is fascinating, even though it deals with a subject and questions that ought to be so familiar to us.
Fire is part of the annual cycle - first the drought and flooding rains, then the fires. But there's also another factor in modern, urbanised Australia: arson. Just this week three teenage boys were arrested and charged with starting a fire in bushland in western Sydney that took more than two hours to bring under control. And before summer is out, we can be sure they won't be the only ones to succumb to the allure of flames.
Tinderbox (the news media's perennial cliche for describing pre-fire conditions) opens in an ominous and only too familiar setting: bare, blackened silhouettes of trees and a sandy clearing where nothing grows. Wisps of smoke curl upwards and the spots of dim but glowing light are a constant reminder that smouldering embers can re-ignite with a breath of rising breeze. (Ally Mansell - set and costume designer, Benjamin Brockman - lighting.)
Just three people - isolated in themselves and from each other - initially take turns to speak. Nastassja Djalog is Viv, a sad, childlike woman whose hopeless innocence hints at a damaged mind and heart. Her next door neighbours are Tom (Alan Lovell), a single parent and firefighter and his teenage son Ben (Benjamin Ross) who mows Viv's lawns while silently despising her kindness. Each has a story to tell - seemingly unconnected - and the disjointed awkwardness of their telling, illuminated in solo spots of light, underlines the alienation at the heart of the suburban setting.
Directed by Zoe Carides in an elegant and spare manner that enables the discrete pain and place of each of the trio, Tinderbox is a revelation of the language and poetry of fire and our fractured relationship with it. The exquisite beauty and fear in the landscape of fire is also vividly drawn. And Australia's culture of fire - going back millennia - is also authentically conjured in a script and performances that by turn inform, illuminate and terrify. (Ross is very strong: a recent graduate of the Actors Centre, he goes straight onto the "one to watch" list.)
What becomes apparent is how devastatingly attractive fire can be; how love and forgiveness can burn as hot and how the purity of honesty is as hard come by as gold. At just 70 minutes and underscored by John Encarnacao's free music composition, Tinderbox is an atmospherically and emotionally charged piece that bursts into flaring life when the three brush up against each other, and otherwise smoulders dangerously. It's a reminder that human emotions are often the spark for greater conflagrations and should never be under-estimated.
