Friday March 29, 2024
King Tide
Review

King Tide

October 25 2007

King Tide, Griffin Theatre Company at the SBW Stables Theatre, October 24 to November 24; ph: 1300 306 776 or online at www.griffintheatre.com.au

In the 90 minutes-one act of King Tide Katherine Thomson poses and illuminates some of the most troubling and puzzling questions of this first decade of the 21st century and affirms her position as a potent bellwether of what ails us. (Even or especially when we don't know we're ailing in the first place.)

The play opens with a collage of screened footage from the mass street demonstrations at the time of the Iraq invasion. The camera has captured the variegated multitude of what politicians like to call "rentacrowd", but could as easily refer to as "the great bulk" or "ordinary Australians" - and they drift by, smiling, laughing, talking, snoozing in strollers, sombre, chanting or waving placards, depending on age and disposition. The footage is being watched by Sal, once an investigative journalist who would have been in the thick of that day, now a wreck who can hardly bear to leave her beachside shack.

The opening minutes of the play unfold as Sal's 17-year-old daughter Beck enters what passes for the action in her mother's frozen world of grief (at the death two years before of her teenage son Max). Through this sequence - the demo seguing into footage of huge, rolling surf - the audience is made aware of one of the traits that make Thomson such an effective painter of the contemporary Australian social landscape.

While those who were marching that day momentarily relive their experiences, and those who were scornful of the event are reminded of their own responses, it's suddenly obvious that at the time Thomson was doing something else entirely. Rather than merely strolling to Hyde Park, the playwright was taking the temperature of the times, making soundings, asking questions, mentally filing away images, analysing ideas and examining thoughts and feelings. Now, all of that has coalesced into a drama that personalises the impersonal and humanises the inhuman by wrapping the cold politics and subsequent social dislocation in the flesh and blood of story.

King TideSal (a luminous performance from Toni Scanlan) is in a world of her own which is both dream and nightmare. Reality is something she prefers to avoid: she shies from phoning old friends, returning to work or a semblance of normalcy. Rerunning the old videos and attempting to cultivate a garden fill her waking hours (which are long). At the same time, however, her politics and moral compass obstinately survive the shattering grief of her son's drowning and continually bubble up in sardonic observations and attitudes, whether she likes it or not.

Thomson is an accomplished comic writer and, happily, she can't help but see the funny side of the most dire situations. This has two consequences: it releases otherwise unbearable tension yet at the same time, also highlights the pain and sorrow which is often the underpinnings of the best comedy. Both these elements come to the fore as Sal attempts to cope with a stranger in the house: Taka, a stray Japanese backpacker befriended by Beck.

Taka (Masa Yamaguchi whose lack of professional stage experience is not apparent in a measured, heartfelt performance) is a complex character. He is at once the catalyst-spanner in the works and moreover the glue that holds Sal's fracturing self together. And, of course, he's not the freewheeling adventurer he at first makes himself out to be.

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The disconcerting multifacets of the everyday human being is also apparent in the character of Beck (Kathryn Beck, making her professional stage debut and visibly growing in assurance from the opening minutes). Beck is a delightful, open-faced, warmhearted teenager. Her care for her mother's predicament is tender and wise in the way of some young people when they're thrown in the deep end of adult tragedy. But like Taka, she is more than the golden child of first meeting.

King Tide

And this is where the real steel and bleak humour of King Tide flowers. To Sal's consternation, her brother Jack turns up, unexpectedly, with his new girlfriend Nat (scene-stealing lines and performance from Anita Hegh). Estrangement between the siblings after Sal's withdrawal into permanent mourning has already been compounded by his leaving wife Claire and two daughters and when gorgeous, corporate Nat opens her mouth to comment on the shack's "Position, position, position ... position," the estrangement becomes an unbridgeable chasm.

Jack (world weary and reluctantly-ageing Russel Kiefel) is a decent man whose work in one of Australia's biggest international corporations has taken him way beyond his origins. He has more money than he knows what to rightly do with and his well-meaning gestures mask another agenda.

King TideThe unbridgeable chasm is brought into stark focus when Nat presents Beck with a gift of "your first Armani." Sal's start and expression of affronted horror only sinks in later. In this context, the first Armani - adored by the child-woman (who looks spectacular in it, by the way) is the 21st century equivalent of "the training bra". Many women in the audience will remember that teenage accessory as a similar absolute Must Have. Unfortunately, like the Prada phone and virtually every other costly current object of desire, it is not only totally unnecessary but quickly turns a happy, idealistic young girl into a discontented, grabby bitch. And herein lies the rotten magical core of Thomson's play.

There is a new generation of young women who will not only laugh with Nat as she talks renovations, stocks and shares and the silliness of caring about anything beyond oneself, but will also be thrilled and flattered at seeing themselves in this smart young woman. And they will laugh at Sal's old fashioned politics and boring desire to contribute to society.

And at that point, Thomson's sly intent becomes blindingly clear: King Tide is not only a small-scale, cleverly wrought, many-layered comedy-drama of life, love and the whole damn thing, but also a wry, angry and sorrowful commentary on a country which has grown to accept and even admire the ascendant politics of greed, dishonesty and complacency.

Patrick Nolan directs boldly, utilising all the Stables stage, end to end, on Alice Babidge's white, blank canvas set, lit into separate areas by Bernie Tan. Scott Saunders adds another layer with some fine solo bassoon music and a soundscape that washes through the action without overwhelming.

The play was commissioned by Japanese entertainment management corporation HoriPro Inc whose vision statement is: "Pioneering new avenues in culture and entertainment that inspire people." King Tide fulfills that brief.

 

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