MORTIDO
MORTIDO, Belvoir in a co-commission with Playwriting Australia and co-production with State Theatre Company of South Australia; Upstairs Belvoir, 11 November-17 December 2015. Photography by Brett Boardman: above - Tom Conroy and Colin Friels; right - Otis Jai Dhanji and Colin Friels.
There is much sly humour in Angela Betzien’s new play, much of it revolving around Krispy Kreme donuts, Qantas, quinoa and Sydney’s eastern ’burbs, where Mortido is set. But it begins with Colin Friels relating a story to the audience that is part folk tale, part urban myth, part magic realism and entirely indelibly horrific.
Nevertheless, he delivers the tale in such a matter-of-fact, almost cheery way, it sets the tone for the rest of the two-plus hours: coolly detached and distanced.
It’s a curious thing to watch an intensely dramatic – sometimes overly-dramatic – narrative about Bolivian cartels, luckless Mexican peons, a mysterious, ruthless, homicidal “Mr Big” (actually La Madre, so a woman, nice touch) a small-time drug-dealing family and all their ambitions, struggles, mis-steps and murders – and feel absolutely nothing. Neither for nor against, neither sympathy nor dislike, neither judgement nor empathy. Perhaps it’s the result of too much coke – the driving force behind everything that happens.
As it is, the main players are Grubbe, a tough cop bent on avenging his dead junkie daughter (Colin Friels); Jimmy (Tom Conroy) a young loser on the make whose brother-in-law Monte (Renato Musolino) is a middle ranking dealer bent on taking over from La Madre who is apparently dying of cancer.
As well as his position in the drug industry, Monte also aspires to the upper middle class: he and his wife Scarlet (Louisa Mignone) live in Woollahra (cue titters) but their expensive but unmistakably bogan outfits give them away (costumes and set: Robert Cousins). Grubbe is also after La Madre, but for other reasons and in an exchange whose verbal agility and laconic playing remind us why Friels is such a star, he sets about sweetly coercing Jimmy into turning informer.
Friels also deftly slips in and out of other roles: Christos, a gruff ex-con who really doesn’t want to do another run for Monte because if he gets caught there will be no one to look after his ailing mother. Then when Monte and Jimmy go to Bolivia they meet him as Heinrich Barbie, a suave drug baron and son of the Nazi torturer known as “the Butcher” – a name he has happily inherited. And a final, small but telling comic turn has Friels relishing his rolling “r”s as the gravestone mason Bratislav from Serbia.
Much else goes on including a parcel delivery that makes The Godfather’s horse head in the bed seem quite benign. Betzien and director Leticia Cáceres seem to share an uncompromisingly wicked sense of humour and a lot of the laughter around the auditorium is probably nervous and disbelieving as much as simple amusement.
The uneasiness and surreal nature of the play is further heightened by the presence of Oliver, a young boy (Toby Challenor and, on opening night, Otis Jai Dhanji) who is Monte and Scarlet’s son. He doubles as an ill-fated Bolivian drug mule and the inevitable blurring of these two is enhanced and made dangerous by the disturbed child’s ritual drawing in red lipstick of stylised cockerels on a glass wall.
The motifs of cocks (male and feathered) and cock fighting also add to the milieu of sex, exotica and treachery in the person of El Gallito (David Valencia), a figure right out of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle – and one who fulfills much the same role with much the same results.
The performances from all the cast are uniformly outstanding with Colin Friels just even more so. Robert Cousins’ black, gleaming, reflective set and Geoff Cobham’s lighting effortlessly conjure up glam mansion, luxe nitery, nowhere and elsewhere alike, with the hapless humans thrown back at themselves and the audience in some kind of unkind kaleidoscope. The action is occasionally punctuated by sound amid a soundscape-composition that pounds the body and senses (The Sweats, sound designer Nate Edmondson).
All up there is every ingredient to make Mortido a memorable experience. Except that it left me unmoved, uncaring, uninvolved and vaguely irritated by the parade of cliches that are the characters – no matter how well acted. But maybe that’s the point, distanciation being what it is and all that. The opening night audience seemed pretty rapt and stomped and whistled at the end; one audient ovated. In the end, nothing annihilates like nihilism.
