Now we are sex
At
just under the fashionable ninety minutes Blackbird is
little more than an extended conversation between two people.
Now an adult Una (Alison Bell) confronts Ray (Greg Stone), the
man who sexually abused her when she was twelve. It's set in the
inexplicably messy lunch room of the factory where Ray works they
lay bare the equally messy state of their lives since that incident.
Like Love Lies Bleeding, the drama is the
consequences of the act and like the early scenes of Love
Lies Bleeding the author of Blackbird, David Harrower,
fills the first ten minutes with awkward chit-chat and Ray trying
to hedge out of her presence. The first ten minutes is as awkward
for the audience as it is for Una and Ray and only after she drops
the bombshell, confirming for her, Ray and us, that he was her
abuser, does the play move into the second and even more confronting
phase.
With the audience of either of the stage and Ray
and Una usually placed at either end of the set, it is like watching
a court case of verbal tennis match. Harrower by name and harrower
by nature, if the details of the disastrous incident are not confronting
enough, the way Harrower ends the play, by having Ray and Una
relive the attraction as well as the trauma, is more disturbing
than the actual details of the act. Bell’s acting is often
pathologically acute.
As Una she is quiet and subdued, a burned out woman
with little anger and few tears left, her normally expressive
hands trying to stay buried, like her past, in her pockets. The
character as scripted almost abuses the character a second time.
Una confesses she was very much in love with ray and wanted to
be with him. She re-states the judge's summing up which referred
to her being unusually mature in that respect. But as the play
veers toward its conclusion the terrible mess that she has become
literally breaks out of her, as it does with Ray, and the spectacle
of it is hard to watch. Stone’s nervous and jitterring voice
and manner suit the haunted Ray.
There is also a suggestion too of Ray being either
a severe penitent or the clever criminal a paedophile is, according
to the essay, ‘Panic’, in the programme.
Michael Magnusson
To read more of Michael Mangusson's theatre reviews,
check out his blog at
On Stage (and walls) Melbourne.
