The first time I saw a play written by Patricia Cornelius it was Savages at fortyfive downstairs in 2013. This confronting work about toxic masculinity and misogyny was bold and muscular and confronting. Cornelius’ poetic dialogue helped to create a push-and-pull between the four male characters that could at times be endearing, before veering into something more animalistic; the chorus as pack.
The play
won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Drama and the Green Room Award
for Writing. It’s the kind of play that stays with you. The characters are - at
times - unvarnished, unrelenting savages but also blokes we all know. They
trot out tired cliches of masculinity and complain about being hard-done by.
They express their love of women, while talking about them like objects. We hear about their relationships to their fathers, their wives, their kids – and these
truths are slowly exposed as fictions they tell themselves.
In this
first production, directed by frequent Cornelius’ collaborator, Susie Dee, the
four male characters were played by male actors. Watching them stalk around the
stage was disquieting pretty early on. The play exposes what’s underneath in a
prologue that describes them as dogs, dangerous and frightening. Only then do
we snap into reality – four men gathering for a trip of a lifetime on a cruise
ship, ready to let their hair down and escape their own lives.
In a new
production, which opened at Theatre Works this week, director Kitan Petkovski
has chosen to cast female and non-binary actors as these men and the effect is
altogether different. The prologue is more impressionistic, but still
viscerally upsetting. It’s in the opening scene that Petkovski uses the casting
to put the audience off-balance. The actors appear on stage dressed in
femme-presenting attire, all gathering – loud and excited – about the cruise
before them.
As the
characters start to shed the trappings of their lives, the actors strip out of
their floral prints, and transform into Rabbit, Runt, Craze and George, the
protagonists and antagonists of the story. As the ship sets sail, so does the
story of a group of friends, who support and egg each other on; mates that become
more dangerous as they start to open up and get their party on.
Early on, I
was aware of the tension of this casting choice, moments that I found discomfiting
in the original production came off as comical in this new production. Not
there isn’t humour baked into Cornelius’ script, but some of the off-handed
sexism played more like satire of toxic masculinity in non-male bodies. But it’s
this subversion of expectation that slowly draws out new layers in an already
dense piece.
Cross-gender
casting can allow female actors to play classic roles that
used to be off-limits to them. Sometimes, as with Trophy Boys, it’s used
to tackle the performance of masculinity by school kids, learning the right and
wrong ways to be men. Occasionally it feels like a gimmick; what does an all-female
Glengarry Glen Ross say about the work itself?
Petkovski
has gathered an unquestionably strong cast, who do take the time to ratchet up
the roiling tension underneath and between these characters. There is a tipping
point where the humour, both intentional and unintentional, evaporates
altogether and we’re stuck on this ship at sea with four men and the
conceit is no longer a trick of this production but the whirring heart of
it.
Aya, Nicci
Wilks, Laila Thaker and Zoe Boeson are astonishing in the roles; disappearing
into the parts and painting a vision that is both desperately sad and horribly frightening.
It’s an ensemble that works so beautifully together, that it’s difficult to
discuss them as individuals. Ensemble pieces are the bread-and-butter of
theatre, but they are rarely so exquisitely fine-tuned as this.
Bianco
Pardo’s simple cruise ship deck is short-hand, in a way, but it’s her costumes that really build out the world of these men, who still often dress like boys. Jess Keefe’s sound design and composition hops between fun
getaway tunes and deeply driving dramatic score.
Petkovski’s
vision for his production of Savages is clear from the beginning, even if
it took me a while to tap into what he was doing. You always hope that new
productions of great plays would make interesting choices to keep the work
fresh and interesting. In a time when intimate partner violence is a scourge
across this country, Savages remains essential theatre. In a moment when
gender definition has become a battleground, this new production envisions the
perpetrators in the bodies of the victim-survivors and leaves the audience with
a devastating final image. A remarkable play in an extraordinary production.
Savages is playing at Theatre Works until September 12
Photos: Pia Johnson
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