Jasper Jones

This much anticipated production of Jasper Jones doesn’t disappoint.  The full impact of Craig Silvey’s engaging, intriguing and moving coming of age story for adults is soundly and compellingly placed on stage.   

Silvey’s narrative, wonderfully recalibrated for stage by playwright Kate Mulvany, opens by setting up a complication – a kind of ‘who done it.’  It then breathes life into and imbues the setting and characters with germane humanity.   All the while it wafts through the liminal space of adolescence as described by Charlie Bucktin (Nicholas Denton) with the gawky authentic voice of adolescence.  The story drives towards finding reasons, understandings and making meaning.  Charlie’s experiences are garnered to comprehensively highlight the destructive toll of a number merciless social attitudes and inequities that we all live amongst or alongside. 

The set (Anna Cordingley) is comprised of very small and truncated buildings, mostly houses that are richly evocative of an Australian country town.  Lighting changes (Matt Scott) are masterfully used to modify and at times render abstract these structures.  These changes fully serve the story by fashioning startling and eerie atmosphere transformations.  Cordingley and Scott also mount descriptive and ambient wonders with silhouettes.

Evenly solid performances from a small number of actors, as characters who sparingly but satisfactorily people the environment and comprehensively convey and represent township and community, are very satisfying.  A number of wonderfully cast actors who are new and fairly new to the main-stage are featured.  Nicholas Denton’s Charley conveys a perfectly pitched mix of naivety, self-deprecation and integrity.  Harry Tseng’s Jeffery Lu touches delicately on raw nerves of the powerlessness of living on the boarders of social acceptance due to race.  Taylor Ferguson’s Eliza Wishart manages to retain an uplifting sense of self worth despite crippling family problems.  And as Jasper Jones, Guy Simon conveys an appropriate mix of incomprehension, belligerence and disarming sincerity.    

Sam Strong’s direction presents a fresh, lively, light and insightfully well-managed whole.  This may well belie all the hard work that has gone into the making process.  The skilled use of the revolving stage helps maintain fluidity and insures the work moves at a satisfying pace.

Although the program discusses the genre ‘American Gothic’, this production brings to mind the ‘Australian Gothic’ and most particularly The Dressmaker.  However, like Silvey’s book it references a number of American Classics.

If you like your theatre to be homegrown, though-provoking, moving and rewarding – this is the MTC offering for you.

Suzanne Sandow

Photographer: Jeff Busby.

Credits

Directed by Sam Strong

Set and Costume Design – Anna Cordingley

Lighting Designer – Matt Scott

Composer and Sound Design – Darren Verhagen

Cast:

Jasper Jones - Guy Simon

Charlie Bucktin – Nicholas Denton

Laura Wishart/Eliza Wishart – Taylor Ferguson

Jeffrey Lu – Harry Tseng

Mr Bucktin/Warwick Trent/Guss – Ian Bliss

Mrs Bucktin – Rachel Gordon

Mad Jack Lionel/Clarry/Officer – Hayden Spencer