Hearth

A family drama, set (mostly) in the Robinson family home on the bushy outskirts of Melbourne, just before, during and after the bushfires of 2009. (The year could equally well be 2019.) The fires bring tragedy, but they are also the catalyst in the aching conflict between brothers: Matthew (Martin Blum, in a powerful brooding performance) thirty-five, and Tom (Kurt Pimblett, disturbingly mercurial) eighteen. 

Matthew is tough, distant, successful, and evasive; he moved away years ago and lives in an upmarket part of Melbourne with bubbly, glamourous immigrant Abbey (a rather too vivacious Sonya Suares).  Tom was the tearaway, hanging out with a rough crowd, mainly his best mate, near-sociopath Danny, and has been often in trouble with the police.  But underneath, what Tom wants, needs, above all is to bridge the gulf with Matthew – for Matthew to be really his brother, that is, a real brother.  Tom’s desire and Matthew’s resistance are established in the play’s very first, non-naturalistic scene.

But the story in the present begins on a day of 46° heat, with smoke in the air.  It’s Tom’s eighteenth birthday.  In the house his Dad, John (a fine, relaxed performance from Geoff Paine), built himself, Tom’s Mum, Barb (a touching Carole Patullo) has burned the birthday cake, but it’s too hot for cake anyway.  Tom’s been accepted into a photography course at RMIT.  Everything seems fine here – even if Barb is getting befuddled and forgetful – and there’s much playful family chitchat.  Matthew and Abbey arrive – Abbey for the first time.  An immediate tension is reflected in strained small talk as Abbey nervously babbles.  Abbey’s role – rather underwritten - is to be the well-meaning but uncomprehending outsider who blunders into the family dynamic.   

As the day proceeds, heat rises and the fires come closer, Barb is anxious and presses Matthew to have Tom to stay with him down in the city.  Matthew firmly refuses.  Abbey is fine with Tom living with them and tries to connect with Tom.  Tom resists, shy under the bravado – but he too wants to stay with Matthew and Abbey. 

Playwright Fleur Murphy employs an adventurous non-linear structure that should work by juxtapositions of past, present, and future but here feels rather contrived.  We realise gradually, a hint at a time, that something very bad – as well as the horrendous fires – has happened.  Family members are interviewed by policewoman Lauren (Eleanor Webster).  Here, yes, we get a good feel for a small country town where everybody knows everybody.  We learn that Matthew, despite his frosty noli me tangere, has driven a couple of times in the middle of the night to help Tom out with the cops – unbeknown to Barb and John – until Abbey blows it.  But there is another more destructive secret to come…

The coy – or enigmatic - hints in the police interviews, the jumps forward and backward in time, become confusing.  As well, the switches among locations that all have to be played out on Chantal Marks’ otherwise splendid but quite specific design, don’t help.  Tom Royce-Hampton’s direction elicits great performances, but unfortunately, he doesn’t manage to distinguish time and place clearly.  I’d question how he could, given the text.  We’re often wondering, ‘Where are we now?’  And ‘When is this?’  We catch up, but the scene will be half over before we do – and while we’re wondering we’re thrown out of the story.  Meanwhile, there’s some awkward symbolism about a pine tree and there are problems with some key exposition when the cast get ‘emotional’, and their diction suffers.

I confess that by the end I wasn’t quite sure what I’d just seen.  I should have cared, but I didn’t.  I had to buy the play text to understand what I’d seen on stage.  It’s puzzling that with this fine cast, a much-awarded playwright, and an experienced director give us a play that mars emotional engagement by straining for ‘effect’ and lacking in simple clarity.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Cameron Grant, Parenthesy