The One

Poppy Seed Festival ends its inaugural (and interesting) event with Vicky Jones’ much lauded play The One. Truth be told, the play itself is a pale imitation of Edward Albee’s magnificent Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?. But where the latter seethes and boils with molten lava of vitriol, the best The One can do is simmer, off the boil, without ever threatening or going over the edge, and so we remain always as observers, never involved in the tension or in any danger.

It’s hard to say where the fault in this lies. Director Tanya Dickson knows her stuff and has assembled an excellent cast. The set-up is promising – an English Professor in love with a much younger former student, but dallying with a colleague and looking for an open relationship (not exactly original or innovative, but workable). They fill their time in this one night, whilst waiting for news of a family birth, with playing emotionally abusive sex games. One realises quite quickly that Jo (Kasia Kaczmarek) is seriously disturbed, perhaps psychotic, constantly testing Harry’s (Ben Prendergast) love for her, putting him on an emotional torture rack to see how much pain he will take before he breaks and leaves her. It’s a device young women have used since time began – and it’s generally the result of extreme insecurity – but there’s no attempt to explore the “Why” of anything in this production, though there are clues, throwaway lines in the text, that aren’t picked up on. Ultimately there’s a sense of disengagement for characters and audience alike.

The couple have boring, loveless sex while changing the channel on the TV and eating Twisties. Where Albee’s characters are driven by passion and even a hatred that is inseparable from love, Jones’ characters seem to be engulfed in ennui.

Dickson says she has tried to Australianise the play, but has done nothing with the attitudes therein. Domestic Violence is Australia’s most prolific crime, it’s endemic, and yet there’s no undertone playing into that, no edge at all, when Jo pushes Harry to hit her. We should wince, want to turn away, but instead we’re mildly amused, and not even shocked when he follows through. It’s as if the play has had the life sucked out of it and what is left is entertaining but no more real than the games Harry and Joanne play.

Prendergast is a terrific actor, but he seems too young to play Harry, and he doesn’t generate the truth in this role I have seen from him in the past, despite his obvious strengths. The problem may be the dynamic between him and Kaczmarek – partners in real life – who seem to work doubly hard to establish an emotional chasm filled with co-dependency between them that doesn’t quite work. Kaczmarek is getting better with every role and is far more confident with every outing. Emily Tomlins gives a strong and suitably histrionic performance as Kerry, Harry’s erstwhile love who arrives in the middle of the night not once, but twice ( totally improbable), to announce that she thinks her partner MAY have raped her, which is the gateway to a discussion on what violence truly is.

Yet, while Harry and Jo up the anti on their lies to each other in the name of the game…and she is far more inventive … Kerry has no reason to lie – and she says that Harry has told her he imagines his hands around Jo’s neck, squeezing the life out of her, because she’s an evil bitch. There’s the opening to the subtext – but the door to it is quickly shut in favour of more games. Though it’s thirty years since my directing days, it seems to me the play would have more edge if that dark subtext was explored – If Jo was openly emotionally abusive and Harry was fighting instincts of physical violence in return…and the game had a much darker underbelly. Then we truly could explore the question of “What is violence?”

When she plays her last cruel trick on him, we should move to the edge of our seats and hold our breath with horror and expectation. Harry has hit the wall, he should go through his choices, which are:- to beat the living daylights out of her or to walk away for good….refuse to play anymore. That’s a thought process which could take a stage wait of ten seconds or more …absolute silence while the tension builds and we dare not move. Prendergast excels at expressing the interior thought process and could have created real suspense.  But, instead, it’s as if this life changing decision is pre-determined by a script they have all rehearsed. And I suspect the rehearsal period was short, with no time to taste the subtext, and so it all feels a little undercooked. Someone suggested to me a third option; that everything continues as before, that there is no escape from toxic dysfunctional relationships. Possibly, but it takes a Beckett or an Ibsen to get away with that and such nihilism doesn’t sit well with the contemporary comic aspects of this play. Instead, you’re left feeling untouched and not caring very much despite the good performances, as a reasonable play ends with a whimper rather than a bang, entertaining when it could have been important.

Coral Drouyn

Images Ben Prendergast & Kasia Kaczmarek, and Emily Tomlins & Ben Prendergast. Photographer: Pier Carthew