INNER VOICES
INNER VOICES, Don’t Look Away in association with Redline Productions at the Old Fitz, 17 June-9 July 2016. Photography by Ross Waldron: above Damien Strouthos and Emma Goddard; right - Anthony Gooley
First staged in 1977 at Nimrod, Inner Voices was the then 27-year-old Louis Nowra’s break-through play – when the theatre world sat up and took notice. And no wonder. Forty years on it’s still startling and imaginatively rich even though, with hindsight, it’s possible to see how the playwright’s recurring themes and ideas have developed further in later work.
Director Phil Rouse gives the play a vivid and pacy production and a very fine cast brings it to life. In the central role of Ivan, son of Catherine the Great, Damien Strouthos gives a sustained virtuoso performance as the young man who has been locked up and alone since early childhood. Consequently, by the time he turns 24, he can barely speak, has no idea of how to behave as a human – or anything else, for that matter – and presents as several kinds of idiot.
History relates that the real Ivan died at this time, but Nowra wondered: what if..?
Enter the scheming and grotesquely obese Mirovich (Anthony Gooley). A classic public servant of two masters – in this instance his belly and his ambition. Mirovich sees the imperial throne with Ivan on it and himself behind it, pulling the strings. With assistance from bumbling flunkey Leo (Julian Garner), Ivan is brutally “educated” and prepared for kingship and to lead the revolt that must succeed if Catherine is to be toppled.
Luckily for the plot and motley crew of revolutionaries, Catherine dies and Ivan is crowned without a blow being struck – except to him by Mirovich’s cronies. But in the tradition of “be careful what you wish for”, Mirovich’s puppet suddenly finds his voice and stretches the strings beyond breaking point. A tsar is born and tyranny is not far behind.
Played out on an ambitious and convincing set of miserable dank dungeons, the tiny stage easily doubles as a place of incarceration and Lubyanka-style place of business. (Design by Anna Gardiner and Martelle Hunt; lighting by Sian James-Holland and sumptuously creepy sound design by Katelyn Shaw.)
The company is the (mainly invisible and sinister voice of) Nicholas Papademetriou, a splendidly klutzy Annie Byron as Mirovich’s other gofer, Pet. Emily Goddard is properly bewildering as both non-princess Ali and a chantoozie who marries Ivan (a sort of dingbat Imelda Marcos). Francesca Savige has the least defined presence but is characteristically strong, nevertheless.
Inner Voices is farcically funny and yet, while you’re chortling you’ll find the playwright has inserted a stiletto of dark and poisonous uncertainty between your ribs, as he went on to do with even greater effect in later plays. Cosi springs immediately to mind as the seemingly sweet but ultimately acidly-sour take on (lack of) human kindness.
Another fine production at the Old Fitz: short, sharp and dazzling. Highly recommended.
