Morph
Review by John McCallum
The Australian
November 25, 2003
Brendan Cowell is developing a distinctive appraoach to human feelings; he plays with them like a cat playing with a wounded bird. Like a cat, his playfulness is an odd mixture of detatchment, cruelty, and fascination.
His new play is a surreal Beauty and the Beast story. It is as if Yank and the young woman who haunts him in Eugene O' Neill's The Hairy Ape got to spend some time together and came to understand each other. It is also a weird love story that digs deep to fins a groteque type of tenderness in the end.
The Beast in this case is Be, a simple man severly damaged by a hideous experience he endured while working on a boat in a brutal male environment. Back on land, he stumbles suicidal and twitching into the bare studio of the Beauty, Grace, a bulimic dancer torturing her body to dredge some expressive art out of it. They have been thrown together by a mysterious, offstage American choreographer preparing to send Grace on to the world stage for a great performance that might make her career but will destroy her.
In Benjamin Winspear's production, Socratis Otto and Rita Kalnejais play the complex dance between these two characters with chilling simplicity. Be and Grace, in their hands, have the naivety but intense absorption of sexualised children playing games they don't understand. On a nicely bare playwood set by Ralph Myers, their image driven obsession with their own physicality, their falteringly inadequate sexuality, and their pathetic dreams of children and family and the whle box and dice of contemporary bourgeois life are played out in front of us around a child's inflatable pool. This makes it clear that this is all a fantasy of people who don't have much hope for lives of their own.
It's all a bit too clever, but Cowell is on to something here. It has a rather glib Tarantino feel, but underneath he seems to be going for a much stronger impact similar to that of English playwright Sarah Kane.
The final scene, when Be suddenly reappears to claim Grace, is comic to its effect but savage in its implication. Perhaps comedy was intended, but when Cowell and Winspear can do bizarre scenes like that without getting laughts, they will have got there.