Replay

Brotherly love can be such an odd beast, a mix of unstated feelings and admiration, pinched by competition and envy, gentle and teasing perhaps but often bullying and oppressive.  Phillip Kavanagh’s new play about three brothers begins with these promising themes.

Replay skips back and forth in time and reality as the brothers dispute their memories, beginning with the probable suicide of brother Michael.  On Tobhiyah Stone Feller’s unchanging lounge set, Peter (Anthony Gooley) and young John (Alfie Gledhill) constantly replay that scene, until without comment the enigmatic Michael (Jack Finsterer) is there on the couch.  

This apparition provokes less reaction than you’d expect, and heralds other inexplicable skips and transitions.  John later at his own wedding is shown wealthy and successful, Peter even weaker and more manipulative.  

The brothers also morph into playing other subsidiary characters, making little performance distinction, and director Lee Lewis and her creative offer no production support for these transitions.  Identity it seems is ever shifting.

The offstage partners of the brothers, their mum, wives and (for the re-born Michael) boyfriend are thinly sketched and add little emotional insight.  Why, we wonder, does suicide stalk this family?  

Kavanagh’s dialogue is well-written, but should crackle with a sharper pace, and more should be peeled off this onion.  His random, perplexing style of storytelling distances us from what concludes as cool, unaffecting vignettes around three brothers.  Ideas about our nation’s future demanding a clear agreed remembrance of the past are – beyond the program notes – left untouched.  

Martin Portus