REVIEW: With Plenty To Consider, PROBE Is Packed With Thought Provoking Ideas

Sunday 8th September 2024, 6:30pm, Old Fitz Theatre

Becca Hurd’s (playwright) PROBE makes its World Premiere at Old Fitz Theatre.  Directed by Rachel Chant, the double hander featuring Ziggy Resnick and Ryan Panizza draws on a familiar experience and layering on challenging questions that are centred on the entertainment industry but are ultimately universal.

Hurd sets PROBE during 2021 when the world was still feeling the effects of COVID lockdowns and the unfortunate familiarity with probing brain tickling swabs.  According the advertising blurb, Hurd, like many in the arts industries, pivoted to work in the new COVID isolation, testing and vaccination industry while theatres where shuttered.  PROBE centres on Hollywood’s shift to producing movies in Australia due to its ability to control the spread of the virus allowing more aspects of life to continue, with certain controls and safety measures.  Fictional famous actor, director and screenwriter Griffin Thornby (Panizza) is in Hotel quarantine in the lead up to working on a new movie and he’s require to submit to a COVID test from the young contractor Holly (Resnick).  The 75 minute work plays out in real time as, starved of human connection that most would remember from 2020 and 2021, Griffin and Holly get talking, and it turns out they share a common bond as Holly is an writer and director at the start of her career who has idolized Griffin for years but neither are necessarily as the seem.

Paris Bell (Set and Costume Design) has created an expression of a contemporary mid range hotel room, complete with monochrome palette, designer light fittings and fairly standard impersonal furniture.  With small costume variations for both characters, Bell presents some visual humor while also expressing Griffin and Holly’s personalities.  Emma Van Veen’s lighting design is utilized to reinforce tension particularly paired with Alexander Lee-Rekers’ relatively sparse but pointed sound design. 

As Griffin Thornby, Ryan Panizza embodies the image of a cocky sexually overt male which the audience eventually learn is an actor currently at the centre of scandal based on a blog post that threatens to “cancel” him and his career. Panizza exudes the confidence of a young 36 year old Hollywood success while tempering his expression to show Griffin’s concern that he’s been misunderstood, asserting that he’s not the monster that the blog and the media are making him out to be.  He makes it clear that while he’s making his case to Holly, he still holds the power both as an older male and as an industry heavyweight. 

Ziggy Resnick allows Holly to evolve throughout the story, giving glimpses into the understanding that something isn’t quite right, gradually peeling away the layers of the complex character.  At first Resnick garners a sympathy as nervous young testing contractor with only 2 hours training before being sent out to test actors in hotel quarantine but it quickly becomes clear that her shaking hands and rambling conversation is due to more than just nerves.  She carries the weight of Hurd’s commentary well as Holly challenges the ideas of power imbalances, the trend to commercialization over creativity and meaning of consent. 

PROBE is an amusing comedy with a darker more serious undertone that will provoke thought and contemplation.  The topics involved aren’t necessarily new particularly in light of the ‘Me Too’ movement that first appeared in 2006 and gained momentum in 2017 with the aid of Hollywood actresses and the evolving laws around consent, but PROBE frames it in a way that contemplates how some people end up supporting the perpetrators, believing their protestations that ‘it wasn’t their intention’ or ‘it was a misunderstanding’ and they ‘misread the signs’.

https://www.oldfitztheatre.com.au/probe

Photos: Phil Erbacher

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