Lost: 5

More excellence from this years eclectic and cleverly situated Poppy Seed Festival.  This time the venue is south of the Yarra at St Martins Theatre.

The Irene Mitchell studio, with its natural brick wall, is the perfect venue to infer the atmosphere of a street for five probing monologues relating to homelessness by Daniel Keene.  Keene is a Melbourne playwright, deeply engaged with social issues and whose work was most prolifically staged in Melbourne in the mid 1990s. 

Lighting by Jason Bovaird and Maddy Seach creates and designates space through projections on the wall.  Cold alienating blue light creates contrast between the humanity of the characters and the brutal circumstances they find themselves.

As director of these monologues, Michelle MacNamara keeps the audience’s focus squarely on her very skilled actors as they highlight the poetic nature of Keene’s compassionate and acutely insightful writing.   Ms. Mac Namara splits the work The Rain in an effort to link the whole and casts several of the roles against the gender they were written for.  There is some disparity of styles, with a couple of works verging on magic realism, and the others more encased in naturalism.

In The Rain, a pervading story of wartime experience, Fleur Murphy talks to the audience from various stages in her life.  She draws us into her bemusing inability to name what she experienced perhaps due to the dire profundity of it.

Two Shanks, as brought to us by Stephanie Pick, inspires compassion for a person outside the everyday - perhaps due to a deficiency in comprehending and accessing the social constructions she lives in. This lone individual is someone who takes her own counsel and does not strive to request assistance but creates her own rituals.

Kaddish is penned about an elderly man who lost his wife.  As played by Marty Rhone he expresses an overwhelming sense of anger from feeling cheated - traumatized by the loss of his wife to a desperate sense of victimization.

Kiniesha Nottle plays her character in Getting Shelter like a wild woman from the Medieval era.  She brings to the work an edge of heightened realism, a little at odds with the more grounded realism of the other characters.  However it could be argued it adds to the variety of the work as a whole.  Ms. Nottle certainly brings with her a sparkling joy of performing and is most entertaining and engaging.

Pearce Hessling most vulnerably conveys the wacky rhythms of someone who would be better served in an institution than on the streets in A Foundling.

Expect to be moved with the depth and complexity of the content about five individuals all of whom have suffered considerable trauma.  This is the type of work that elevates through its vital and elusive insights.

Suzanne Sandow