It’s December, the start of the summer break, and two teachers at a school in a regional town are entertaining themselves with a pantomime of the story of Anastasia Romanov. Damon and Olena are drunk and amusing themselves when Chris arrives, a former student and recent addition to the school faculty. They are glad the holidays are upon them, but even the games they play start to pick at the troubles between them.
One of the students
at the school, Luke, has decided to transfer elsewhere. He’s made a complaint
about being harassed by a staff member at the school. Chris wonders if it was
Damon, but the older man pushes back leaving a black cloud in the air. Olena
has grabbed more drinks from the shed and the late-night talk turns to the
discussion of sex education and Damon is worried that societal squeamishness
over homosexuality – it’s 2007, after all – means kids won’t know where to go
if they want to know more about their sexuality.
A heady,
intellectual discussion about what is appropriate in the classroom and what this generation of students is comfortable with ratchets up the tension, leaving the three of them more than a
little bit unsure of each other and the subject of Luke leaving.
Playwright Angus Cameron often writes about sexuality and power dynamics
in his work and his new play, Luke, which opened this week at Red
Stitch, focuses on student-teacher relationships and how fraught they can be.
In the opening scene, while Damon is tired of being labelled a paedophile because
of his homosexuality, he has strange fixations on the age of consent in
different states and countries. Younger man, Chris, is provocative in his
questioning of Damon, but is this a way of clearing his name or trapping him?
The waters are murky indeed.
Part two of the play sees Chris return to the town a decade later,
having written a book about his life growing up in the small town, with a
particular fixation on the story of Luke and what he remembers about the
incident ten years earlier. Olena still lives in town and Damon has disappeared
years before. Everything we’re presented from here on out leaves the audience
to question the veracity of what we saw and heard in part one.
While the construction of Luke is fascinating, it’s difficult to get
to the heart of these characters when their heads keep getting in the way. They
want to dissect everything from an intellectual perspective, with the real
emotion left off-stage until late in the piece. As the show progresses, there
are twists in the narrative that had me leaning forward, wondering where things
were headed, but I really wish I felt more for the people trapped in these
awful circumstances.
Dion Mills gives as a layered performance as Damon, exposing different
aspects of the person he is and the one Chris remembers. Olga Makeeva is a good
foil for both of the men, but even though she has a clearer recollection of
what might have happened all those years ago, the character isn’t allowed to match
the story-driving power of Chris. Will Lonsdale imbues the younger man with a
mercurial edge, but he’s a difficult character for the audience to grapple
with.
Cameron’s script, developed through Red Stitch’s INK program, and ushered
to the stage with dramaturgy by Gary Abrahams, and directed by Iain Sinclair,
has a lot of knotty issues on its mind. It’s about sex and power and memory and
art and personal biases and translating life to the page (and the stage), but
apart from leaving things open for a post-show discussion, I’m not sure what
the play wants us to feel.
Luke is playing at Red Stitch until October 11th
Photos: Parenthesy
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