Ben Walter’s Patalog Theatre has been producing extraordinary work in Melbourne’s independent spaces for nearly a decade, beginning at St Martin’s with Jez Butterworth’s Mojo in 2017. Throughout the company’s history, they’ve delivered stunning productions of British plays like Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman and Simon Stephen’s Punk Rock.
Patalog’s latest
production, Grace Chapple’s Never Closer, opened last night at Fortyfive
Downstairs. It’s the first time the company has worked on an Australian text –
though it is set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. Chapple’s play was
first produced at Belvoir in 2022 in their Downstairs space, and proved so successful,
it was remounted in 2024 upstairs. It is a full-bodied examination of the lives
of five friends, their relationship to the conflict around them, and how they deal with the
fall-out of the decades-long trauma.
The audience
sits on three sides of the playing space, with a design by Dann Barber and Ella
Butler that has us peering into a room that is fully decked out in retro
detail. It’s mid-century furniture, filled with knick-knacks and clutter, and
the kind of crockery you might still find at the back of your mother’s
cupboard.
The first
scene – set in the 70s, when the characters are young – is played through lace
curtains, lending both a haunting and nostalgic vibe. Once the curtains are
opened, we are dropped into Christmas Eve and the long-awaited reunion of a
friendship group that has since been scattered to the wind.
Diedre is
still living in the same house. Nothing has changed. Her father and she want to
hold onto the life they had when her mother was still alive. Jimmy arrives and
declares, after all these years, he has feelings for her. But recently she’s
been shagging their old mate, Connor. Mary is dancing around the fact she’s
ready to up sticks and move to New York, while Niamh returns from running away
to London. She’s done worse than that, though. She’s returned to Belfast with
an English boyfriend, Harry.
As the play
unfolds, we are treated to a reunion play that hits some well-worn tropes,
while being set in a fascinating period of history. Each character has their
own stories of losing family members and other friends to the violence, which turns
up the tension beyond long-boiling squabbles and truths that have waited a
decade to come out.
Director
Marni Mount has assembled an astonishingly-talented cast in this Melbourne
debut of Chapple’s play. It’s an ensemble piece that asks a lot of its actors,
given its heightened emotional state throughout. In the early scene, the group
is haunted by literal ghost stories. Later, they are haunted by the lives they
have led.
Similar to GAME.
SET. MATCH. which opened at Malthouse this week, Never Closer opens
with an Acknowledgement of Country that explicitly links the content of its
play to colonialism and stolen land. Chapple’s play is not shy about pulling
apart the conflicts of the time and putting the naïve English character on
trial for the crimes of the country he hails from. Karl Richmond’s bumbling
Harry is ripe to be attacked, since he works for PM Margaret Thatcher and knows
so little about what is really happening.
Central to
the interpersonal conflict is Damon Baudin’s Connor, whose father died in a
bombing years earlier. He has no time for Harry and will not give Niamh any
leeway, since she left him and Belfast to find a new life living amongst the
enemy. Baudin gives us simmering tension at the start of the reunion, but when
he returns late in the play – drunk and belligerent – we are witness to an
extraordinary turn.
The
naturalistic back and forth of the whole group carries the play with that kind
of rapport you only have with lifelong friends. Much of the drama is built on
how well they all know each other and the gaps they have now since they have
all lost touch. The characters are cheeky and clever and get on each other’s
nerves, but when they start to pick at each other’s frayed edges, things get
more and more heated.
For all the
emotion I felt during the show, the choice to stage the show in a box, with the
audience peering through windows, kept me slightly at a remove. Each window is bisected
down the middle, which feels right if you’re going for reality, but often
obscured one or more actors for me. Perhaps it lends the production a frisson of
voyeurism, but it was sometimes quite frustrating.
That concern aside, Mount helms a production that is powerful and unfliching, creating a show that creates moments of real devastation.
- Keith Gow, Theatre First
Never Closer is on until May 24
Photos: Cameron Grant
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