Kid gloves
Age of
Consent was first presented at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival
in 2001 and then subsequently at The Bush Theatre. This production
began its Australian life at this year’s Adelaide Fringe.
The program notes suggest that the play was inspired
by the Jon-Benet Ramsay and Jamie Bulger cases. But Peter Morris
himself is never that specific in the play itself or in the original
program notes. This is a conceit of the production or director.
He began, he says, with notes of "monologues about tabloidization
of youth". Now he says he doesn’t know "if it
is still about tabloidization (whatever that is), but its certainly
about youth, and what it means to be a child or a young person
in the world today."
The
play is made up of two intertwining monologues: the first by a
young single mother Stephanie, played by Caroline Kemp, attempting
to bring up her young pre-teen daughter Raquel; and the second
by a young nineteen year old male Timmy, played by Ivan Donato,
awaiting his release from a correctional facility after serving
his time for the murder of a child. The text is wonderfully written.
Insightful, poignantly funny, inherently tragic.
Caroline Kemp’s performance is confusing.
One is not certain whether Stephanie is just a dim-witted woman,
herself a victim of bad parenting and contemporary media aspirations
who looks for a "celebrity" way to bring up her little
girl - a panto career, a modelling career, a Les Miz career, an
advertisement actor’s career - who blithely pursues that
path at the expense of her child’s well-being in total ignorance
of the consequences on her child; or a mother who in the desperate
need not to be a failure knowingly pimps her child for personal
comforts. Her last scene in an old crumbling villa in Tuscany
"So much… peace" while her daughter is under the
predatory guidance of Desmond Varady, "walk down to his car,
him with the picnic hamper" ….containing... "A
bottle of claret and two glasses... and her little hand reaching
up to clutch his pinky finger." Stephanie is left behind
with her last line "You have no idea how nice it is to be
alone."
The performance is superficial, an actress aware
of the comedy and not much of the opportunities of the tragic
pathos inherent in the character. The direction of the performance
is not clear enough. Muddled. On the performance I saw the actress
noticeably lost concentration several times and had to correct
her text which suggested to me someone who had played this role
too often and was simply acting a facsimile of what was on the
page, not much depth or real presence in the moment or else incredibly
nervous. Stephanie’s final moments had tears running down
her cheeks. It was puzzling to try to understand why.
On the other hand the performance of Ivan Donato
is spectacular for its balance between the emotional explosions
and cool headed awareness of Timmy. A young child who looking
for love, attention, acts out a tragic event that results in him
hitting a young friend with lead piping like "Mrs Peacock
did in the conservatory" in the game of Cluedo then subsequently
putting a battery in his mouth "because I thought he would
come back… come back on, he’d start moving…
like in Toy Story, the second one." and now as an
intelligent young man, ten years later with a good education in
the correctional facility, trying to find a way to live in a world
that he is about to enter with no acceptable motivation to explain
what he did. He worries about leaving a life where he is regarded
as unique to enter one where he will be like us, the opposite
to unique, which he believes is the equivalent to worthless, hopeless.
Mr Donato inhabits this character and is both scarifying and empathetic.
Mesmerising to watch.
This is a very interesting play. Unfortunately the
production under the direction of Shannon Murphy does not reveal
its full potential. The design (set and costume by Rita Carmody),
lighting (Matt Schubach) and sound (Steve Toulmin) are functionary.
The management of the two actors in the space sometimes distracting:
Taking us from the focus of the play merely for positional shiftings
of the other actor.
This play reveals what Gitta Sereny in her 1998
book Cries Unheard urges us to consider. These two voices
Stephanie and Timmy are only two of the voices in the contemporary
world of rising abuse and violent juvenile crime. And like the
subject of Ms Sereny’s book, Mary Bell, "there are
many people in our society who dismiss children such as Mary as
'evil' and with that both condemn them and absolve themselves
of any responsibility for their fate." And if a play such
as The Age of Consent can serve any purpose, on hearing
Stephanie and Timmy’s voice it must help us to change that
attitude, must help us to change the future - for the sake of
all our children. The final consent that Mr Morris engages in,
is this complicit consent we give for this story to be told. "The
consensual relationship: not just the willing suspension of our
disbelief, but more generally the profound sadomasochism entailed
when any audience assembles… I simply mean: tragedy gives
pleasure, and we come to the theatre (read and watch the tabloid
media) to watch these characters suffer (Big Brother, Australian
Idol), but I hope we also come to empathise, and suffer with them."
Like the startlingly brilliant film of Hanneke Funnygames
(both the original and the American remake) it is quite disconcerting
when Timmy at the end of the play talks directly to us, first
person, no fourth wall, and tells us to "Applaud. For yourselves.
Clap hands for you and me and all of us whose voices count for
nothing in this world, I mean, we made it this far in silence,
didn’t we? We might do something about it yet. Know what
I mean?"
A flawed production but recommended both for the
play itself and Mr Donato’s work.
Kevin Jackson
To read more of Kevin Jackson's theatre reviews,
check out his blog at
Kevin Jackson's Theatre Reviews.
