desert, 6.29 pm

A bloke in a work shirt, outside in his garden, belts out a song into the ‘microphone’ of his garden hose.  Inside, a tired woman comes home from work and lapses into a detailed-but-romantic private sexual fantasy… until her prickly, depressed daughter walks in.  They’re all expecting the son for the weekend…  Like old times.  He’s moved out (escaped?), but he will turn out to live in his own world too. 

Here, in this ‘normal’ family, ‘normal’ is the front for four separate, secret worlds.  This is a family of solipsists.  No one notice, no one suspects.  It’s better that way.  And, via Romanie Harper’s clever design, we are observing them, objectively, so to speak, in their oh-so-normal house, through the frames of a 1960s glass wall or picture window that spans downstage and separates us from their living-dining area.  We watch them eat a succession of meals, play a card game, sulk, get drunk and fail to connect.   

Morgan Rose has crafted a play in which people talk straight past each other and the banal verges on the absurd – and it’s funny but cruel.  No one’s a bad person; there’s no malice in them; they’re just, each in his or her own way, alone.  In some very brief scenes – mere seconds – we see just how alone.

Daughter Xan (Eva Seymour in a pitch perfect performance), the centre of the play, has just finished school, already has a boring job, is depressed, irritable, judgemental – a teen who’s just finished school, in fact - but nursing a secret hurt she cannot and dare not share.  She spends a lot of time staring sightlessly at the television screen.  When she explodes and smashes things, no one makes much of a fuss about it because to do so might involve asking why is she that unhappy.  Best to sweep it up and have your cereal out of a mug.

Familiarity has bred, if not contempt, a blinkered, taken-for-granted numbness between Mum Crystal (Sarah Sutherland) and Dad Rico (Joe Petruzzi) – these performances both immediately recognisable and true.  Crystal’s a realist with lowered expectations; when she wants to lure Rico into a bit of nooky, she’s got to do it via an offer of pizza.  Rico, benign and unruffled (a pretence) says whatever comes into his head, but backs off fast if that could create a problem. 

When son Jamie (Darcy Kent) gets home, we see a heavy set young fellow making a valiant but ham-fisted attempt to define his own identity distinct from this family where, it certainly appears, no one is all that interested in any one else.  There’s a hint in Ms Seymour’s and Mr Kent’s performance that once brother and sister were close, that they relied on each other – but that’s over now.  Has to be.  Jamie’s attempt includes being assertive (calling his sister a ‘lesbian squirrel’ and giggling) and a relationship with a matter-of-fact older woman, single mother Abby (Ella Caldwell) – possibly sexual and not much else, and difficult when this household may have secrets but no privacy. 

With a lesser cast, desert, 6.29 pm, could easily seem a rather slight piece, with its murky depths unnoticed, but with Bridget Balodis’ insightful direction and a cast who clearly ‘get the point’, Morgan Rose’s irony and absurdity is brought out and delivered with precision.  It could work as television and it is close to sit-com (c.f. The Royle Family) in that its story comes full circle and to rest.  But here we cannot separate text and performance: it’s the combination that we see – and it works.  Writing and performance are sympathetic, non-judgemental, but never maudlin or sentimental.

By the end, we may be sad for Xan, but we realise this family is ‘normal’.  No secrets have been shared, but, as families go, this one is happy enough.  Or as good as it gets.  Best not to look too deep.  They’re together; and in their way, they love and support each other – ‘a haven in a heartless world’. 

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Tessa Noble