Rules For Living

Tinselled up for the silly season, the STC returns from COVID darkness with that old sit com trope of a dysfunctional family reuniting on Christmas Day, and then tearing each other apart.  But British writer Sam Holcroft adds an inventive touch of reality TV by flashing on screens each of the characters’ hidden idiosyncrasies.

Matthew (a convincing Keegan Joyce) is an aspiring actor who turned lawyer and pines for his brother’s wife: he has to sit down – and eat – whenever he lies.  Brother Adam (Hazem Shammas), a once promising pro cricketer, has to speak (endlessly) in silly voices when revealing truths, while his wife Nicole (Amber McMahon) stews in alcoholic need, and anger at Adam’s hopeless procrastination.   Matthew’s partner Carrie (Nikita Waldron), insecure and fresh from NIDA, must dance out inappropriately bawdy songs and score a laugh before, thankfully, she can sit down.

And Edith (Sonia Todd) is the traditional Mum, planning Christmas with military precision: she furiously cleans whenever truths and conflicts threaten.  Designer Charles Davis delivers an attractively detailed open room from Sydney’s affluent North Shore, exploiting the Drama Theatre’s wide stage, here topped with those screens intermittently revealing each new rule for living. 

Director Susanna Dowling slickly integrates this theatrical messaging, but the secrets, while prompting some good gags, are hardly profound, just as Holcroft’s characters themselves struggle to reach beyond bluster and cliché, or move us to much real, empathic laughter.

Premiered by London’s National Theatre in 2015, the play has been artfully adapted by Holcroft herself with Australian references and jokes.  In the second half, it leaves truth further behind and happily cranks up into riotous farce when the dominating patriarch, Francis (a classy Bruce Spence), who’s a former judge but now demented, returns from hospital, and some real secrets are hurled into the mix.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Daniel Boud