Review: THE GOAT, OR WHO IS SYLVIA at Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Tuesday 14th February 2023.

So perfectly timed for Valentine's Day, a perfect blend of comedy and tragedy, which is farce. The play is called The Goat, but is better known by the subtitle Who is Sylvia?, a lyric from Shakespeare's lesser-known romantic comedy, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Martin, an architect at the zenith of his career, has a wife, Stevie, a kid, Billy, and a secret love. Had Sylvia been a fourteen-year-old girl, the play would have been a tragedy, but this is Albee at his finest. Sylvia is the goat. Now, of the paraphilias, bestiality is perhaps the most shocking to our urban feelings. Greek myths are full of it: Pasiphae and the bull, Leda and the swan, and half-goat Pan with any warm body. It still happens, as any rural magistrate may disclose over dinner.

I've seen two previous productions of this play, one from State Theatre, and one recently from the Adelaide University Theatre Guild. I remember the general theme and the outline, but this production is side-splittingly, laugh-out-loud, and uproariously funny. The early dialogue has the cut and thrust of a brittle Noel Coward play like Private Lives, but the thrusts are fiercer and the cuts deeper, with real blood eventually staining the stage. Mitchell Butel has scored a hit, yes, a palpable hit, and the laughter from the audience is our way of coping with the shattering tragedy taking place on stage. Such is Albee's genius.

Nathan Page, better known to many as the love-conflicted Jack Robinson in the Phryne Fisher TV series, is a fine protagonist, bewildered from the start by his secret, and trying desperately to make sense of his life. It's Claudia Karvan, as Stevie, whose own descent into chaos is the motive energy. From a sophisticated woman whose response to her husband's first confession is to swing by the feed store, to the vengeful wife and mother who destroys her rival, she's as avenging as Medea or Electra. Mark Saturno is accomplished as Ross, the best friend whose letter to Stevie confirming the situation ignites the explosion. I couldn't see if the envelope had a stamp and postmark. No postal service on earth could have delivered it so quickly. Hermes, messenger of the Gods, more likely. Yazeed Daher takes on the role of Billy. His credits are TV and film. On stage, with three such accomplished performers, he's getting an important lesson.

Martin's downfall, and such a fall was there, has the classic resonance of Oedipus, and the great tragic plays of the Greeks, rooted as they are in goat-inspired rituals, loom like the fates and furies over this upper-middle-class family in their elegant home. They have the right credentials. They have a gay son and they vote Democrat. "You do vote Democrat, don't you?", inquires his best mate.

Yet, as Martin cradles Sylvia's corpse, keening wordlessly, I could see how everything could be made right, with therapy. There is a therapy group mentioned in the play; Therapy and image management, an appearance with Oprah. Albee's description of the play as "notes towards a definition of tragedy", harks back to Aristotle who despised it for its lack of rational thought, but Albee creates a narrative that engages our attention and carries our thoughts along at speed. For us, there is no catharsis, except that of laughter.

The family home, created by Jeremy Allen, is elegant, with artworks, books, and ornaments waiting to be smashed. That wanton destruction of paintings and bowls is both a metaphor and a shock. Who hasn't wanted to impale a picture or throw a vase in anger? Ailsa Patterson's costumes essentially locate the characters socially. All seems perfectly well. Special thanks to specialist prop maker Elias Ppiros for Sylvia's appearance, and all those shattered pots, ostrakoi in the waiting.

Photography, Matt Byrne.