Review: RULES FOR LIVING Fuses The Most Stressful Meal of Most Family Calendars With Reality Show Style Behavioral Instructions.

Friday 6th November 2020, 8pm, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House

Sam Holcroft's (playwright) RULES FOR LIVING brings Christmas chaos to the stage as the tensions of family gatherings are heightened by ever increasingly absurd reality show style rules for how characters behave. Directed by Susanna Dowling, this bizarre confection has moments of relatability and is a nice distraction from the real world whilst never really imparting any new wisdom, much in the way reality TV does.

Holcroft draws on the plethora of family farces and silly season specials to present the fallout from bringing together an upper middle-class family together for Christmas. As with previous years, the fastidiously clean and organized matriarch Edith (Sonia Todd) is hosting the lunch for her family but this year is unique in both youngest son Matthew (Keegan Joyce) has bought his overexuberant girlfriend Carrie (Nikita Waldron) to meet the family and, more significantly, Matthew and his brother Adam (Hazem Shammas) will finally learn the truth about the severity of their father's recent medical issues as Francis (Bruce Spence) is released from hospital. Edith wants everything to be perfect. Matthew worries that Carrie won't fit in with his conservative family, warning her off her crude jokes and inflammatory conversations. Polar opposites Adam and Nicole (Amber McMahon) are trying to give the appearance of a happy family but the struggles of raising a child, Emma (Ella Jacob), diagnosed with crippling anxiety from an all-consuming desire to please. All are holding secrets and cope with the challenges of their lives with modified behaviors dictated by Holcroft's script, spelled out in screens that span the top of the stage. These rules range from the plausible, such as "Matthew must sit to tell a lie" to the outright absurd of "Carrie must stand and dance around to tell a joke". This takes the work from something that could be a relatable and insightful to predominantly overplayed and ridiculous without providing any significant understanding of humanity.

Designer Charles Davis' broad expression of the living space of the family home allows for immediate recognition that this family are not struggling, fitting in with the premise that Francis was once a successful lawyer and judge. The somewhat impersonal décor matches the idea that Edith is obsessed with cleaning so object 'art would be unnecessary dust collectors and the only real touch of family sentimentality is the portraits of Adam and Matthew in the corridor. The costume selection also helps anchor the characters quickly, with the uptight Nicole outdressing everyone in a fashionable frock and stiletto heels while Adam and Matthew sport Australian summer Christmas appropriate shorts and actress Carrie goes all out with the festive theme.

The standout performances come from Amber McMahon and Keegan Joyce as both have a natural comic sense that ensures that no matter how absurd Holcroft's script becomes, they can still infuse a truth to their characters. Both ensure that their characters, even when stuffing their faces or downing glass after glass, are still plausible and the Rules are more just making the audience aware of the coping mechanisms that Matthew and Nicole employ to deal with life. Between the script and Dowling's direction, the other characters are too absurd to engage with and their dramatizations are too forced, particularly Waldron's expression of Carrie which feels overly forced and not intuitive at all as if the performer can't understand the character either. The repeated gags for the more absurd rules become tedious for the majority of the characters leading to audience disengagement.

As a piece of escapist theatre RULES FOR LIVING may appeal to someone that has no desire to take anything away at the end of the experience apart from the satisfaction of being able to sit in a theatre with other patrons and see a live show again as the engaging performances from McMahon and Joyce however fail to make up for the work's flaws.

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