Theatre Review: Anytown
Anytown
Hellie Turner
Blue Room Theatre
Teapots of all shapes and sizes clutter the rustic set as country music plays the audience to their seats.
Brooding in alabaster white over this country town, the mysterious all-seeing statue Felicity (Cathy Lally) pours tea and watches. Reputed to be the originator of the special brew of tea that seduces the lotus-eaters of this town, she observes the unfolding lives of an almost soap-opera dysfunctional family and an outsider, played with kilted bravura by Kingsley Judd.
Bella (Gaynor O'Hare), and Charlie (Matt Penny) are challenged by their daughter, Dixie (Whitney Richards), who rips apart their complacent lives with rampant small-town ambition and easy sexuality.
Craig Williams competently plays a range of characters, all sharing the same surname, from the paedophile parish priest to the mute yet eloquent Paulie who doggedly uncovers one of the many buried secrets of the town.
All the play's characters feel a sense of being trapped, settling for scraps, "bags packed, eyes elsewhere". Directed by Janet Pettigrew, the cast handled the shifts in mood with focus and commitment.
The play has a stream-of-association logic, moving seamlessly from image to image and one outrageous situation to the next, withholding answers to persistent questions. Playwright Hellie Turner's poetic yet acerbic turn of phrase overlays the bluntly brutal and ordinary lives of this "any town". Music and projected images are woven into the action.
The unfolding mysteries take the audience deeper into dark places, the "archaeology of pain", in ways that are reminiscent of Dorothy Hewett's The Man from Mukinupin. There is little to reassure or redeem the dark humour of this world of betrayal, hidden secrets and marital infidelity, malignant as lemon butter. However, the audience chuckled quietly at the wit and tart observations.
Like Thornton Wilder's Our Town, there is a deliberate breaking of the fourth-wall illusion with actors speaking directly to the audience.
Running at just on 90 minutes, Anytown gives voice to important themes in rural WA. Like any new play, it would benefit from further script tightening. It is unlikely to boost tourism to this particular town but it does hold a cracked mirror to the human stories behind the endless cups of tea.
Anytown runs until May 28.
