THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE
THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE, Griffin Independent and Just Visiting at the SBW Stables Theatre; June 19-July 13, 2013. Photos by Peter Greig: Yalin Ozucelik and Ava Torch.
The $10,000 Griffin Award "recognises an outstanding play or performance text that displays an authentic, inventive and contemporary voice. Plays or performance texts submitted may be original ideas or adaptations from other forms." And Vivienne Walshe's 2012 winning play isn't yet another adaptation even though the blurb describes it as "a love story that conjures Orpheus leading his Eurydice out from the underworld of small town hell".
This Is Where We Live is aptly titled - the everyday nowhere that can be a small town or a parched suburb. Chloe (Ava Torch) is a girl in need of rescue - from herself, her family and her classroom where her attempts to rise above the snide misses and lascivious jocks by taking on the persona of a sex-bomb are supposedly derailed by youthful inexperience; but mainly by her stubbornly hidden dyslexia.
Her unlikely white knight is the misfit Chris (Yalin Ozucelik) whose decency and easy literacy triumph in the end - which is not a spoiler by the way, but an inevitability. Ozucelik plays the boy with convincing and heartwarming geekiness - you just know he has skinny bony knees and is shyer than a week-old colt simply by the way he smiles. Torch is less persuasive; her sultry vamping is heavyhanded - she's more blowsy old barmaid than teenage nymphet. It's possibly a matter of degree - a lighter touch would help and director Francesca Smith could possibly consider paring back the character as much as the rest of the ultra spare production (designed by Fiona Crombie).
Walshe's play is vivid and poetic and frequently comical. It is also oddly overwrought and in this form could work as well on radio - there is minimal theatricality. It's also a trap and a risk to write in your program notes "This play arrived as if it already existed, and I just took notes. I wrote through the night and it was as easy as breathing." Really? I don't think so. The most talented playwrights know it's not like that. And if it is, something is definitely awry.
The rest of the 2012 Griffin shortlist were works by Patricia Cornelius, Declan Greene, Alana Valentine, Angus Cerini and Kit Brookman. It would be interesting to know the judges' thinking in picking their winner.
