GOOD WORKS
GOOD WORKS, Darlinghurst Theatre Company at the Eternity Playhouse, 31 October-29 November 2015. Photography by Helen White; above Stephen Multari and Toni Scanlan; right: Anthony Gooley and Stephen Multari.
First staged in 1994 and not seen in Sydney for close to 20 years, Nick Enright’s play is a skilled and complex story of two boys, Tim (Stephen Multari) and Shane (Anthony Gooley) and their lives in small town Australia of the early 60s.
Tim’s background is middle class and Shane’s is rough and not. But the play begins in a city gay bar some 20 years on with Tim playing the coy and customary game of movie trivia with an older friend Alan (Jamie Oxenbould). When “John” (Anthony Gooley) walks in Tim is immediately drawn to him, not least because he’s convinced this palpably menacing bit of rough trade is really his long lost friend Shane.
Interwoven with the boys’ stories are those of their mothers: Rita (Taylor Ferguson) the barmaid down on her luck whose careless love will unwittingly lead her son Shane to the dark side. And Mary Margaret (Lucy Goleby) an orphan but nicely brought up girl whose friendship with Rita cannot survive the religious and class prejudice of her parents (Toni Scanlan and Jamie Oxenbould).
The suffocating complacency of the Menzies era has supplied rich material for any number of creative Australians and Nick Enright is no exception. In Good Works he has crafted a 95-minute play that unsparingly takes apart the hypocrisy of small town life, Catholic self righteousness, mini-minded intolerance and – finally – the beginnings of future-light dawning. It’s a remarkable piece of writing and beautifully set up for its characters by director Iain Sinclair.
The characters go back and forth between youth and adulthood with easy focus and clarity and the doubling (quadrupling for Oxenbould who also plays the strap-happy Brother Clement, and trebling for Scanlan whose cranky Mother John is an Irish classic) means the narratives move with uninhibited ease towards the inevitable outcome.
The company is uniformly excellent in maintaining the intricate rhythms and placements of each of the characters. The arch of the Eternity space is utilised neatly without over-egging its significance and Sian James-Holland’s lighting turns the space into a magical, ethereal nowhere-land. This sense is enhanced by Nate Edmondson’s soundscape and music.
The whole is imperilled, however, by a set design of free-standing pedestal constructions of various heights up and down which the actors have to clamber (design Hugh O’Connor). Quite what they mean is a mystery but they are clearly difficult to negotiate and are therefore extremely distracting – to no purpose that’s immediately evident. If the cast survives the season without injury it will be a miracle.
Meanwhile, Good Works is yet another reminder of what an extraordinary talent we had in Nick Enright and he is well served by this mainly very fine production. Recommended.
