,Something wrong with this song
THEATRE
The Song Was Wrong
By Melissa Cantwell
2 stars
Perth Theatre Company
Studio Underground
REVIEW DAVID ZAMPATTI
The Perth Theatre Company has put some significant runs on the board since it became the junior tenant of the State Theatre Centre in 2011, based on smart programming and some astute partnerships with independent companies such as Weeping Spoon and Side Pony, forged by its artistic director, Melissa Cantwell.
Cantwell has also demonstrated she is a sharp, inventive director, often delivering productions with greater contemporary appeal than PTC’s bigger upstairs neighbour, Black Swan.
But the company’s latest and most ambitious project, The Song Was Wrong, is a significant misstep.
Cantwell wrote and directed this romantic tragedy about a young Australian musician and a French photographer but the layers of symbolic imagery and theatrical baggage she imposes on it fatally obscure its essentially simple narrative.
Christian (the impressive Felix Jozeps) meets Cecile (Astrid Grant) at a photography exhibition some time (I’m guessing from the phones and photography) in the 1980s. They bump into each other on the street later; there’s coffee, wine, flowers, sex — and love. Christian plays Satie’s Gymnopedie; she takes pictures of his hands as they play. Nice.
But there are problems for Cecile back home in Paris. Her father is ill in hospital but she can’t find out how seriously from her mother. Her father dies, the couple argue about money, she’s homesick and alienated in Australia. She falls pregnant, is desperate to see her mother, goes home.
She leaves a message to say she won’t be coming back. She’s ill now and admitted to hospital; Christian, desperate, flies to France to find her. So far so good.
There’s a second layer of characters, an older, blind man (George Shevtsov) wheeling a pram, a beatific flower seller (Jacinta Larcombe) who selects blooms that convey messages for the characters. He is, I guess, the older Christian; she’s, what, an angel?
By now, though, we’re in that dangerous territory where the people on the other side of the Fourth Wall know much more about what’s going on than we do.
And that’s before water starts pouring out of Christian’s boots, a woman meanders about with a giant broken egg and rows of shoes appear on the stage to be swept up by the cast (which includes Sarah Nelson and Thomas Papathanassiou as various incidental characters). The flower girl curls up semi naked in a box full of dark leaves and petals, Cecile, hugely pregnant, lies on a light box
Some scenes are inexplicably extended — a cleverly written but jarring and unnecessary rant about Australian society from Cecile, a similarly clever and just as unnecessary mime of the long flight to Europe by Jozeps and Nelson among them — while large chunks of exposition are missing or remain unilluminated.
I am sure there’s a lucid, or at least theatrically rational, explanation for all of this but it pretty well escaped me.
There are some very fine (and probably expensive) production values on show, in particular Nick Wales’ dense, intricate score, but none of them makes us any the wiser. The performances too, especially Jozeps’ natural, emotional Christian, are good.
But new work needs to be tested, next door at the Blue Room or elsewhere — as many of PTC’s previous properties have been — before being given a full main stage production. It’s disconcerting such a process wasn’t followed in this case.
For all that, I suspect The Song Was Wrong will have its admirers. There is no obligation to be one of them.
The Song Was Wrong runs until June 20.
