The Bitterling

Company: La Boite
Venue: Roundhouse Theatre, Kelvin Grove, Brisbane
Dates: To 4 April 2010

 

Lost in the flood

The Bitterling is a long play. The lights went up at 7.30 and it was close to10.30 when we filed out of the theatre.
It begins boisterously and ends powerfully and shows the strength of Sven Swenson’s writing by the fact that he holds the audience’s attention throughout with a cast of just three. They are Ruby the grandma, Rose, the mum and Kevin, the son, and they turn out to be a not very holy trinity.

The scene is set during the disastrous Brisbane floods of 1974, with incessant rain and water rapidly rising against the walls of the house.

Tea chests are filled with belongings, ready to be hoisted onto the roof if necessary while Ruby and the 15-year-old Kevin cope with the rising waters and listen to the rain, ready to help each other.
Dominating the set is a huge photograph of a World War II digger, complete with slouch hat and enigmatic smile. He is Ruby’s dead, war hero husband.

Into this cosy nucleus suddenly enters an unstable neutron, Rose, Ruby’s daughter and Kevin’s mother, back after a fifteen year unexplained absence. She explodes onto the scene, boasting of her sexual exploits, talking dirty to her son, abusing her mother and using the foulest of language.

We learn that she became pregnant at 16 and at 17, abandoned the child shortly after it was born to run way to gain some of the freedom she felt she never had.

Freedom is what Swenson maintains his play is all about. But the question is asked: Is the freedom always worth the pain? Rose ran away from the misery of a permanent crying baby isolated in the confines of a chicken farm where she lived with a woman dried up with grief and who she felt hated her just for being alive. Now she is back trying to explain herself to Kevin, who has no memory of her at and always believed she was dead. He is horrified by the coarseness of the woman who shrugs away the notion that she isn’t sure who his father is, and yet fascinated because she is his mother and he wants to know her better.

All this trauma and yet we have no idea whey she is back. She never tells us, although she vaguely hints she has come back for her son despite not showing the slightest signs of love or guilt for her abandonment. Her sole reason for being there seems to be to cause trouble and upset her mother; her effect on the boy seems to be simply collateral damage.
Ruby obviously hates the sight of her daughter, but there seems to be something deeper than just being left to care for Kevin, who has grown up into a fairly normal, if bookish young man. Kevin is shocked and confused by all the fighting that goes on around him. So Act One is basically an exposition to set up Act Two.

Ac Two sees some changing of perspective, secrets are revealed, we find out why Rose returned. She has facts to hand that will give her revenge on the woman she blames for her slide down life’s ladder. Other sides of the characters emerge, but neither Rose nor Ruby gain empathy. Only Kevin maintains his dignity.

It is never an easy job to direct your own work. There are always questions. Do you inflict your embedded ideas of your characters or do you let the actors interpret them for you freely? Swenson seemed to meet his actors half way with a happy result. All three put in stellar performance and created memorable characters.

Dash Kruck was Kevin and he was terrific. He began as the puzzled, awkward teenager and worked through fear and joy and bewilderment to create a special performance. A great achievement was to create a strong presence in a long scene where his mother and grandmother were battling it out, both verbally and physically while he, after an initial attempt to break up the fight, sat miserable and alone without word to say or an action to perform. This was a powerful time in the play and brilliantly played by Kruck.

The always capable Louise Brehmer played the recalcitrant Rose, the bullying low-life who had a witch’s cauldron of emotion brewing under the brash, hard exterior. She strutted round the stage, swaggering, deliberately shocking with a highly energetic performance. Kaye Stevenson was her nemesis, her mother Ruby. She was defensive, aggressive, withdrawn, outspoken and relentless in her punishment of Rose and defence of Kevin, her one link with her dead husband.

As said, it became very powerful towards the end, just like life, everything is resolved and yet nothing is resolved.
I felt the play could have been edited down by several minutes, especially in the second act. I was ready to applaud three times, but Swenson took the ending another step and then another, which for me was too much. I also thought that Rose came on too strong, too quick in the first act and didn’t develop at all until after the interval when her transformation was dramatic.

Tim Wallace’s set was highly effective as was the lighting design by David Walters and, after a mildly irritating opening when I found it difficult to concentrate on the dialogue with music humming in the background, the sound design became an integral part of the play. Phil Slade did an excellent job.

The Bitterling, the title of which is fully explained during the play, continues until April 4.

Eric Scott

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