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Double Bill: Reunion  - A Kind of Alaska
Review

Double Bill: Reunion - A Kind of Alaska

December 3 2006

Cate Blanchett is no ordinary superstar actress with an Oscar and multi-million dollar individual workplace contract in her backpack. The pressure and media scrutiny she’s been under since returning to Sydney has been extraordinary. And - most recently - since being anointed next queen of the Sydney Theatre Company, that pressure has become almost audible in its intensity.

These days Blanchett goes about her business under conditions that would make most people head for the hills. Or lash out and land a haymaker on the jaw of whichever snapper’s long lens is up her nose today. Instead, she remains serene and dignified, unassuming and reasonable. It’s an astonishing performance and suggests she has an inner toughness and resolve that will make outgoing steel magnolia Robyn Nevin look like a pussycat by comparison.

And it’s under these circumstances of a white hot spotlight and idiotic levels of expectation that Blanchett has made her debut as a stage director. It seems characteristic that she chose a one act play (modest), but one by Harold Pinter which is demanding of audience and actors alike (ambitious, nevertheless).

A Kind of Alaska is the description given to where Deborah (Caroline Lee) has been during the 29 years of a sleeplike state during which life has gone on: her parents have died, her siblings grown up, married and divorced. She wakes and is faced with an adult self when she knows only the world of her childhood.

Lee’s performance is mesmerising as are the screaming silences and pauses of Pinterworld where realisations and awful possibilities are conjured - almost visibly - in the air around Deborah’s hospital bed. She is attended by her doctor (Robert Menzies) and, eventually, is visited by her sister Pauline (Justine Clarke) but neither are able to offer her much solace and precious few answers as she is told: “you have been nowhere, it is we who have suffered.”

As well as the demanding yet rewarding text, the challenges of the play are also physical: Lee is confined to a white bed in white light constrained by the encroaching blackness of still water. Traditionally said to run deep, these waters reflect and distort the small efforts of the humans and enhance an already powerful sense of isolation, alienation and sadness.

Set designer Ralph Myers and lighting designer Nick Schlieper have managed - with the island platform surrounded by water, starkly and precisely lit - a playing area of extravagant simplicity that concentrates attention on the actors and the texts with microscopic keenness.

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Blanchett’s direction is equally clear and sure. It would be easy for Lee’s bewildered Deborah to descend into bathos, or for the obscurity of the situation to overwhelm Menzies’ angrily passive doctor and then, inevitably, to overwhelm the audience. It doesn’t happen. Instead there are shocking and pitiful moments of comprehension as Deborah struggles to come to grips with her predicament. A Kind of Alaska is an absorbing hour spent in the world of an exceptional playwright in his prime (Pinter was 52 when he wrote it) brought to life by a fine cast and confident, intelligent director.

Double Bill: Reunion  - A Kind of Alaska

By way of contrast, David Mamet’s Reunion was written in 1976 when he was 29 and his status as a giant of modern American theatre was still in the future. In terms of quality and challenge, Reunion has almost nothing in common with the Pinter play. It does, however, also have a central theme of a long span of years. In this instance it’s the 20 which have gone by since reformed drunk Bernie (Menzies) has seen his daughter Caroline (Clarke).

Written in fragmentary scenes which are, nevertheless, all part of the same conversation, Reunion is what Caroline hopes for when she tracks down her father to his lonely, single man’s room. Undoubtedly a confronting vignette of human and emotional wreckage when first seen in the 1970s, the play now has only the strength and conviction of Menzies’ central performance as the recovering alcoholic to carry it.

In both plays, Justine Clarke is in the supporting role and has much less to work with than either Menzies or Lee. Nevertheless, she does a brilliant job of small gestures, tiny moments, exquisitely timed thoughts and action.

Her contribution is particularly telling in Reunion because as a director Andrew Upton favours the behaviour never seen in real life where characters stare at (invisible) walls or windows while the other talks to the non-speaker’s back. If you can imagine a situation where this might happen to you and your reaction isn’t “look at me when I’m talking to you” or “stop staring at that bloody wall and talk to me” then you’re probably not cut out to be a stage director either.

In Reunion father and daughter talk, stare into space, move here and there within the barely furnished room; stare into space some more; Caroline smokes two cigarettes and becomes agitated. They stare into more space, Bernie recalls the war and announces that he may get married again (the unlikeliest moment in 45 commonplace minutes) and then, suddenly, it’s over. The audience is left staring at the water and wondering what’s next. Polite applause, is the answer.

Reunion and A Kind of Alaska, Wharf 1, extended season to January 20; ph: 9250 1777 or www.sydneytheatre.com.au

 

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