Wolf Play

Wolf Play is about a Wolf at the centre of a family drama – a catalyst who brings to the surface all the flaws and troubles of flawed and troubled people.  He is a wolf, played by Yuchen Wang; a lone wolf - who speaks, who howls, who tells of wolf lore and of wolf needs – and he is also a six-year-old boy, sold on the internet to a new family, represented by a puppet.  If all that sounds confusing, it is not confusing on stage in this intricate and gripping play about the need for connection.

(Our audience was three-quarters school kids, and they were completely engrossed throughout.  No whispering, no giggling, just total attention.)

Childless Robin (Jing-Xuan Chan) buys a child on the internet.  Robin aches for normality and niceness – even though her same-sex partner, Ash (Brooke Lee) wants to be a professional boxer.  Ash’s trainer and coach is Ryan (Kevin Hofbauer), Robin’s brother and a loud and failed boxer himself.  Now he’s living vicariously through Ash while running a small (and we suspect failing) gym.  Ash, whose character armour is attack, is totally, violently against buying a child and threatens the child’s father, Peter (Charlie Cousin), when he drops by to deliver the child… 

Peter is selling the child because his wife Kathy is initially expecting and the marriage is rocky and he figures, maybe, without the boy…  But the boy has a mind of his own (he is, after all, a wolf) and he will prove contrary – brilliant but disruptive (Ryan insists – loudly and repeatedly - that the boy needs discipline), destructive yet tender in surprising ways. 

Everyone in Wolf Play is angry, including the forever disappointed Robin, because of failure or fear or frustration.  The child – the Wolf - exists at the centre of a storm of boiling emotions.  All the characters are Americans and director Isabella Vadiveloo makes no attempt to Australian-ise them.  The cast commit to this and it works.

This specificity somehow makes the situation and the emotions both believable and universal.  They shout and whine and fight – but we don’t check out on them because each of this excellent cast makes it so clear what each is hiding and we feel for them, even the pathetic Peter.  As for the Wolf, it is astonishing how much meaning and emotion can be generated by a blank-faced non-naturalistic puppet (usually manipulated by Yuchen Wang who also voices the Wolf’s thoughts).  The Wolf puppet is created and made by Tamara Rewse.

The drama plays out on Sam Diamond’s all blue and white striped set that suggests a stadium for contest and conflict - and serves to bring together several locations with minimal changes.   When things are happening simultaneously, Vadiveloo puts them on stage simultaneously – such as the male frustration of Ryan in his kitchen shouting (he’s always shouting) into his phone to his mother, who cannot accept Robin’s relationship with Ash, while Peter, beside him on stage but in his kitchen, is shouting at off-stage Kathy. 

The complexity of the plot and the characters’ emotions never overwhelm our understanding because of the precision and clarity of the direction and the finely focussed performances.  As the story builds to the crucial bout that will decide Ash’s fate, we get a superbly choreographed fight, Brooke Lee as Ash suggesting each punch and counter-punch, and Ash’s opponent – until an intervention that is both dismaying and deeply moving.   

This is a play about many things – parenting, the individuality of a child, sex roles, same-sex marriage, competition, success and failure – but the central metaphor is bold but clear and the strands intertwine and reverberate so skilfully that they make up a coherent whole.  At the end we are limp, strung-out and yet accepting of the truth of it all. This is a strikingly original and sophisticated play, realised by a skilled and tenacious cast, director and designers. 

Michael Brindley