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Show: Who’s afraid of the working class?
Society: Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Venue: C (venue 34)
Credits: Sydney Theatre School Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, Christos Tsiolkas and Irene Vella
Type: Sardines
Author: Chris Abbott
Performance Date: 09/08/2015
Who’s afraid of the working class?
Chris Abbott | 10 Aug 2015 09:53am
There has been discussion in The Stage recently about the extent to which student showcase performances, typically a series of extracts rather than a complete play, can really do justice to the talents of emerging dancers. The performance of Who’s Afraid of the Working Class by Sydney Theatre School made a strong case, however, for choosing a single script which will give opportunities to a large number of performers.
Directed by Gabrielle Rogers with Roel Voorbij and with five authors, many of them well-known Australian writers, this was the definitive ensemble piece. At first, it seemed like a series of monologues and separate scenes but gradually links became clear between the different storylines.
The audience arrived to find the cast onstage in underwear; as the piece began, they took on their characters as they dressed. The script took us straight into the complexities of Australian politics and ethnic diversity, quite a challenging area for much of the audience, and a handout with a paragraph or two of background would have been helpful for a non-Australian audience.
The dialogue from the beginning was raw, explicit and often sexually violent; not a comfortable watch then, but definitely a suitably challenging task for these confident young actors. A young gay man talks about his father and his fantasies about the Prime Minister; two young women talk about borrowing money and later get involved in shoplifting; a businessman meets a prostitute and a young boy, also a sex worker, tries to protect his younger sister, who has been abused by family members.
The stories gradually coalesce but with uniformly grim dialogue and plot development; only the protective brother seems to be a sympathetic, although weak, character. In many cases it was difficult to discern the relationship between the characters, probably because the contextual markers inserted by the writers were not picked up on by this audience.
The story eventually comes to an end around an incident at a charity shop were the brother and sister have died in a fire. It is an unrelentingly downbeat piece and the class politics are quite disturbing; do the writers really have no sympathy at all for the working class in Australia?
Despite the despressingly one-sided portrayal of a large swathe of society, this was an effective vehicle for the students of the Sydney Theatre School, all of them giving good performances in a difficult environment.
The flyer lists the cast but not the parts they played, so it is not possible to comment on individual performances, but the group as a whole demonstrate the quality of their training and their potential as effective and challenging actors.
- : admin
- : 09/08/2015