peteg's blog - noise - theatre - 2013 11 12 Anaconda

Anaconda (produced by the Tamarama Rock Surfers, at the Bondi Pavilion)

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As the BOM predicted, the rain ceased in the early afternoon, so the ride up to Bondi after dinner was quite pleasant. The ride home via Dover Heights was even nicer.

This is a play by Sarah Doyle, who apparently has some form for writing these things. Today was a cheap Tuesday, so the price was $21 to sit in the front row just off centre. The set essentially evoked the triangles of LGBT iconography (though I have no idea what a blue triangle implies). The themes were heavy (sexual assaults by schoolboys on schoolboys) and the drama toys with notions of redemption, the bystander effect, the unfixable, the incorrigible. None of the characters develop much, despite the revelatory air; in particular Leeanna Walsman is (valiantly, ably) stuck playing a society housewife (also careerist lawyer?) who just wants her husband's opprobrium to go away. Does this scandal make my bum look fat? (Again, Walsman herself does a fine job.) New jailbird Walker is pure symbol. I guess this is the problem with such extreme situations: everyone and everything is so polarised that we're left asking equivalents of "what would Jesus do?", for various notions of Jesus.