Bob and Murph are getting old. Bob is trying to face that fact head-on but Murph won’t play that game. He still feels young and vital and, if he admits that he’s getting on, he might find that it’s true.
Bob has
escaped to Hanoi – to get away from Melbourne, to spare his son from dealing
with a dying father and for the cheap mangoes.
Murph has
followed his old friend because he loves travelling. And he loves women. Bob
accuses him of having a child on every continent, but even if that’s an
exaggeration, it’s not because Murph has stopped trying.
A young Vietnamese
woman, Duyen – whose name Murph keeps mispronouncing – has followed him home.
He’s being gregarious, trying to entertain her. He’s clearly trying to sleep
with her but she’s not falling for his charms. But why has she come home with
him?
Dan Lee’s Flake
is an interrogation of age and death. Bob’s refusal to reconnect with his son is
in stark contrast to Murph, who is attentive to his children – even if they are
all from different broken relationships. Bob is scared that if he goes back to
Australia, he’ll get stuck in a nursing home, so he’s determined to see out his
final days in Vietnam.
Duyen drops
in and out of the narrative of the two old white guys, and seems to be a
convenient narrative device – to get Bob and Murph to open up. Even when she
starts to get a backstory of her own, the twist in the tale feels contrived.
When Dan Lee
first wrote this play, he wrote it without the character of Duyen, but during
development, performer Chi Nguyen was brought in to help him develop her. The
development of a play is never a straight line and playwrights should be
seeking to work with a variety of collaborators to get the world they are
writing about right.
The world
of Hanoi as described in the play is rich in its detail and set designer Jacob
Battista has put together a flat in that city that looks authentic. It’s small.
It’s grimy. A drab room for Bob’s final weeks.
The old men’s
verbal sparring is the key action of the play. They like to hear themselves
speak. Bob loves using long words and phrases to skewer Murph’s black-and-white
view of the world. There’s light conversations about their friendship, and
darker conversations about family.
Much of the conversations in the play are circular, too. Bob’s failing health and fading memory might explain why he keeps saying the same things over and over again, but it gives the play a halting and unnatural feel. It’s also unfortunate that, due to illness, Robert Menzies was not off-book for opening night – and though some of his monologues made you forget the pages in his hand, some of the arguments weren’t as full-throttle as they needed to be.
Joe Petruzzi
is perfect as Murph – giving awful Australian tourist, as well as genuine
concern for Menzie’s Bob. Phoebe Phuoc Nguyen brings a lot of passion to the
character of Duyen, but she’s overshadowed by the two older men. The structure of
the play demands it be that way, which is a real shame.
There’s a
lot of interesting ideas in Flake – about dying with dignity, bodily
autonomy and how the elderly are treated in Australia. Setting the play in Vietnam
is troubling, though. Bob describes Hanoi as a “brain” at one stage – vital and
full of connections – and you can see what Lee is trying to say about Bob’s dilemma
about his dying days.
But then
the country feels like a prop, a backdrop, a metaphor for what he’s feeling. And,
in the end, the play is about the age-old conflict of whether or not to reconcile
with your family when you’re on your last legs. Couldn’t that story have been
told in Melbourne? Did this play need to have the window-dressing of a foreign
country?
The cast is
great, but the text still needs work. There’s important subject matter being tackled
in Flake but in a way that’s difficult to engage with.
- Keith Gow, Theatre First
The play
runs at Red Stitch until November 5th.
Photo: Jodie Hutchinson
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