Power play

If you thought that the theatre of ideas was dead then you haven’t seen a Stephen Sewell play. If you thought that comedy is laughs without ideas then you haven’t seen Sewell’s latest play, It Just Stopped.

It Just Stopped, a ‘comedy at the end of the world’, is set in New York on the 47th floor of an apartment building. Beth (Catherine McClements) and Frank (Marcus Graham) are getting ready for work. He is at his computer writing a piece about Wagner which he hopes will be printed in The New York Review of Books, she is about to leave for her job as assistant to a talk radio host, and then, it just stops! The computer crashes, all power is gone and they find themselves isolated and apprehensive, alone despite the fact that there are surely people all around them. They dare not open the door, let alone use the stairs. Who knows what might be out there? Didn’t they hear that a body was recently found in the garbage chute?

The first act is hilariously funny, with Beth and Frank increasingly desperate, seeking to remain calm. It’s nothing; all they have to do is wait for help. They launch into a debate on whether or not Wagner was a Nazi sympathiser, Frank vehemently defending Wagner, after all ‘art is pure’. Beth is not impressed. What if it is a gas, or a terrorist attack? Why don’t we ever hear anything real? And then the doorbell rings.

Enter Bill (John Wood) and Pearl (Rebecca Massey). Bill is a loud-spoken ocker billionaire; Pearl, the epitome of the dowdy housewife, hanging onto her husband’s arm and parroting everything he says. Still they are real people; or are they?

The play begins to turn dark and surreal. Although there is still plenty of laughter, it is laughter tinged with fear; a fear of what is happening. Who are these people, what have Beth and Frank done, what can or should they do? The play shifts seamlessly back and forth between ‘reality’ and nightmare, offering glimpses into Frank’s subconscious, revealing the violent and dangerous side of the characters, and yet always just held back from going over the top by the skilful direction of Neil Armfield. We are left wondering, what is the reality?

The performances are all strong and the pace is hectic. John Wood is superb as the wise- cracking ocker who’s made his billions through cardboard. If you’ve only ever seen him as Senior Sergeant Tom Croydon in Blue Heelers then you have missed seeing the full range of his acting ability. He gives Bill all the avuncular bonhomie one might expect, but Bill has a dark side and Wood subtly makes sure we are aware of his underlying menace. McClements is strong as Beth, full of nervous energy, a doer not a thinker. Marcus Graham’s Frank is the idealist, the artist who wants to believe that art can be ‘pure’ and stand alone. He declaims to a sceptical Bill that art needs to be incomprehensible, and that, like life, art should be a mystery! Rebecca Massey’s Pearl is wonderful, a mousy housewife who, with the help of more than a little alcohol, reveals her other side!

The set quickly establishes the sense of surfaces – all image and little substance. It is red and white, resonating with a designer’s touch. A living room to be seen not to be lived in, which makes the soon to develop ‘hell in our living room’ even more disturbing. Equally the jazz music belies the reality, which is anything but cool and romantic.

Nothing is quite what it seems in this play. The audience is drawn in to laughing at and with the characters. Often the laughter is born of recognition: the stereotyped Americans whose apartment is part of their salary package; the stereotyped ockers who aren’t as benign as they seem. But there is more to the play than stereotypes; they may be a source of laughter but the issues raised are all too real. This is the world we know and live in, the world that is running fast towards an apocalyptic end, and what are we doing about it? This is a question asked not only by the characters, but inevitably by the audience.

Sewell is happy to be called a political playwright and proud to be an activist. In his writing, he knowingly and actively engages with the world in which we all live and constantly seeks to challenge our complacency, whilst at the same time pushing the envelope of theatrical form. It Just Stopped is perhaps a departure from his earlier plays in that it is very, very funny but it also has a dark underbelly that asks us to think about our world and our place within it.

Jan Chandler

Send us your feedback on this article or anything else in The Blurb

It Just Stopped

Company: Malthouse Theatre & Company B Belvoir
Venues: Malthouse Theatre, Southbank, Melbourne
Dates: To April 23, 2006

Review provided by: