Review: THE DARK ROOM, Theatre503

Angela Betzien's The Dark Room is a tough play to watch and, partly in consequence, a hard play to review, insistent in its demand for a response that can, inevitably, only be subjective - perhaps more so in this instance than ever.

We're in Australia's Northern Territory, somewhere in that vast hostile space in the kind of "left behind" town the people of which have brought forth handwringing from us cosmopolitan types, with their political support for glib populists - at least, that's the case in Europe and the USA.

The accents, the heat, the clothes, even the bogan moustache worn by Stephen, a boozy cop straight out of Bluey, all evoke the land Down Under, but this could be anywhere - which proves both a strength and a weakness of the play.

Grace (oh the irony) is a feral teen, a girl who lists her psychological problems in the abbreviated jargon of the mental health professional. She is more dingo than human - and not without reason, her backstory slowly revealed in all its horror. She's stuck in the motel room that gives the play its title with Anni (Katy Brittain), all decent commitment to social work, whom Grace bullies mercilessly - mentally and physically.

These two soon freeze and another odd couple enter the room. We become aware that we're witnessing conversations that take place in the same room, but at different times, and that there is a single emerging narrative that binds them.

Emma (Fiona Skinner) is pregnant, trapped by her condition, but also in intellectually impoverished Bush, longing for the life she left behind as a Sydney schoolteacher. That situation is largely due to her policeman husband, Stephen (Tamlyn Henderson) who is also exiled by his posting, but able to find an identity in the ocker culture of his cop friends, whose company he prefers to his wife's - but it's a pull with more than mere beer and bragging at work.

That's because Craig (Alasdair Craig), the alpha male at the station, is hiding a secret made manifest in his imagination by Joseph (Paul Adeyefa), a dead aborigine boy who dressed in dresses and stoned signs. Craig is a sadist and a bully who hides in plain sight, masked by his good works in the community - a figure becoming familiar as stories of systematic child abuse are uncovered.

If you're thinking that's quite a lot of plot for 75 minutes all-through, you're right, and not every character is explored as a rounded human being. The feeling persists that they stand as proxies for attitudes and emotions rather than flesh and blood people, as we hurtle from one problem to another.

For all its laudable intent (and, with its grounding in true stories from the worst excesses of a government unsympathetic to those on the margins of its society, the more melodramatic scenes acquire a free pass from many - if not your reviewer), the show has little new to to say. Charles Dickens was doing this stuff 180 years ago, Lionel Bart was making a musical of it 57 years ago, and even recent smash hit movie The Florida Project covers similar ground, albeit with much more nuance and joy.

There's a "poverty porn" element at work here that has its heart in the right place, but makes me uneasy - after all, almost everyone involved in this show, on either side of the fourth wall, has won at life's lottery and is, to some extent, gawking at the poor - and there are more ways to be poor than just the financial. Of course, cast, creatives and audience are also giving voice and attention to those neglected by the harsh realities of the 21st century - the glass half-full argument and perfectly legitimate.

But it's so hard to watch! Annabel Smith is utterly committed to playing Grace with maximum pain on show, but the (apologies for the gendered, layman's term, but I think it's the right one) hysteria is so loud, so cruel, so distressing that it's hard to take it all in. It also feeds into a problem I have with cruelty depicted on stage (see this piece), the infliction of mental trauma accepted much more readily than physical beating (though this play does not shy away from that dimension of Grace's aggression).

The sheer volume - in both senses of the word - of the shouting in so intimate a space also turned too much of the dialogue into a kind of white noise, nuance and balance sacrificed to the impact of an emotional sledgehammer pounding away on our sensibilities.

By the end, one is exhausted, but not in a good way - though it was clear that around me, others felt all the power without all the pain. But the relentless script and full-on performances, the absence of light and shade (what starts off grim, gets grimmer and grimmer and grimmer) and, for the most part, a lack of humour and empathy. just wore me down. But perhaps the most disappointing aspect is the gnawing sense that we've been here before so many times in only slightly different ways and - I fear, inevitably - we'll be again soon. The questions are raised but answer comes there none.

The Dark Room continues at Theatre503 until 2 December

Photo: Alex Brenner

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