Green Park

There’s something very equalitarian about casual gay sex. Total strangers often cross so many borders of class, nationality, background, generations and wealth to negotiate one moment of ecstasy. 

Writer Elias Jamieson Brown takes us on a Grindr date to show us how it’s done. 

On a park bench is Warren, a middle aged, country bloke, waiting to hook up with a fey yet fond art student who looks half Warren’s age.  In contrast to Edden’s promiscuity and drug-fuelled escapades, Warren, we learn, is a family man obsessed with keeping his sexuality secret – which is yet another border for the two to cross.   

This unfolds as we the audience lie back in the grass in front of their bench, hearing through headphones their quiet, sometimes raunchy, slow sharing of their contrasting lives.  We are in Green Park, in Darlinghurst, once the heart of gay Sydney. St Vincent’s Hospital – with its own gay history through AIDS - is across one road and, on the other, the infamous Wall where rent boys used to preen. A gay beat was also in the park around the toilets, now gone; Warren remembers it, and some sad ghosts; Edden is too young.

Instead Edden, who has a macbre streak, fantasies about the Darlinghurst Goal hangman who lived in this place. Brown artfully weaves such ghosts and past lives of Green Park into his play, and director Declan Greene nicely takes the action across the park as tensions grow. 

Indigenous actor Joseph Althouse captures the fleeting enthusiasms and confusions of Edden, while Steve Le Marquand mostly rises above the greater challenge of showing us beneath Warren’s straight façade, and endless use of “mate”.  It’s hard to project such depths in the dusk and distance of the park, but sitting there overhearing them redeems all.

Green Park is a tender and revealing hour which should have many outings.

Martin Portus