By COLIN ROSE
Date: 13/04/2003
What: Rabbit, Griffin Theatre Company.
Where: The Stables Theatre, Kings Cross.
When: Until May 10.
Tickets $28-$38.
Mondays ``pay what you can".
Bookings 9250 7799.
Rating: 5/10.
IT'S been a good week for full-frontal nudity and drug use. On stage, I mean.
Rabbit is a new comedy albeit bitter, cynical and very black from arguably the most promising of Sydney's young playwrights, Brendan Cowell . It's bang up to date, so the peeling off and getting high are not particularly pleasurable, as they are in the 1960s musical Hair. They are the consequences of grief and breakdown.
Rabbit takes a hackneyed situation a young woman introducing her lover to her dysfunctional family and tries to make something very strange from it. It updates Stanley Kramer's movie Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (1967), although the prospective son-in-law in Rabbit will be greeted with suspicion, not because he's black (he's not), but because he's a rap singer and heroin junkie. The father, Paul Cave (William Zappa) , is a radio talkback host a la John Laws . His prejudices are established at the top of the play as we hear him spraying racist invective across the airwaves. Reactionary demagogue that he is, he's particularly offended by (surprise!) rap music. His daughter, Madeline (Cecily Hardy) , watches her boyfriend (Socratis Otto) shoot up in preparation for what will undoubtedly be a nerve-wracking dinner the rabbit of the title with Paul and his glossy, silly trophy wife (Anni Finsterer) .
Paul's chauffeur (Russell Kiefel) appears from time to time with a plea that falls on deaf ears. Paul has all the credentials of a complete bastard. He's an absent parent, to boot, and so Madeline has chosen this evening to launch an all-out attack: she's got the junkie boyfriend, she's dropping out of university and she's going to work as a nude dancer. If only all new plays could get this sort of start.
The Griffin Theatre Company has mustered a top-flight team in director Kate Gaul and designer Brian Thomson. Zappa is one of my favourite actors and he gives a monster of a performance. But there's no papering over obvious shortcomings in Cowell's script. He should hide his thesaurus or get an editor who's not seduced by his loftier flights of language (when was the last time you heard a character use the word ``persiflage"?). And his satire is too shrill and heavy-handed. I'm not convinced shock jocks and, for example, rapper Eminem need any help sending themselves up. They do a pretty good job on their own. Ultimately, the cliches Rabbit would like to torch are made of straw. Even so, the play fails to start a fire.