Into The Shimmering World

This is the last of Angus Cerini’s loose trilogy of dark Gothic plays about violent and insecure men or defiant women out on the land grappling with Australian nature.

Farmer Ray is near cracking with anxieties as the drought digs in. The rains – and elation – do finally arrive but, as is the Australian way, they bring a catastrophe of flooding. His farm is destitute, the cattle swallowed by mud or shot dead, and Ray’s anguish is seeping through his stoic, blokey reticence.  

The play begins with quick vignettes as he and his rock of support, wife Floss, move easily around each other in the kitchen making endless cuppas and checking in that all is OK in an almost wordless ritual.  But it’s not, of course, and when Floss is no longer there and debt closes in, Ray writhes in an astonishing ballet of agony on the kitchen table.

Colin Friels’ performance of Ray is mesmerising as he flickers through his defences, once all boyish charm and daggy joker, now desperate to win his dream, to nurture and pass on this struggling land, but failing, and drowning in self-loathing, Kerry Armstrong as Floss is tremendous, warm and watchful, but she leaves the play too early.   

All the 90 minutes of action is in that open kitchen and on the verandah (watching the weather), which designer David Fleischer stakes up high and alone above the earth, surrounded by unforgiving dark space.  And Nick Schlieper etches that house in light shifting through days and nights.

Cerini keeps the focus on Ray: he’s lucky to have Friels in the role, so nuanced and physically compelling. Bruce Spence is the delightfully laconic neighbour, Old Mate, but not for long.  James O’Connell plays the local cop come to confiscate Ray’s rifles and the son visiting from the city, bemused at his Dad’s lack of reason.  And Renee Lim is the home care worker nudging him into another home, for the aged.  All are excellent in underwritten roles circling the devastation of Ray and his farm.