Glimpse is the first offering from The Kin Collective, an ensemble of television and stage actors who met in a master class give by acting coach Larry Moss. For the last 18 months the company has been improvising and devising content, investigating personal encounters between strangers, family relationships, and the fear of making a meaningful connection with those around us.
The resulting production is a series of loosely related vignettes as the characters deal with loss, death and regret whilst finding small moments of solace in others. Poppy (Michala Banas) copes with a wayward teenaged son and a failed relationship. James, Christian and Grace (Linc Hasler, Keith Brockett and Laura Maitland) struggle in the aftermath of their mother’s death and Julian (Mark Diaco) reveals a tragic past that ties him intimately to Ziggy (Tom Barton).
Character portraits are the focus of Glimpse, with monologues and duets forming the main dramatic structures. The work is highly naturalistic, though peppered with vastly articulate, poetic language that rarely comes off the cuff in tense, emotional situations such as the ones portrayed. In this way, Glimpse sometimes seemed more like a daytime movie soap opera than a nuanced, theatrical work.
However, there were some quietly powerful and understated moments. A brief second of comfort in an airport and an awkward first date conversation about Scrabble both featured the excellent Marg Downey and revealed a sense of subtext that was mostly lacking in the rest of the work. These sections elevated Glimpse above the tendency to be maudlin and overblown by portraying the extraordinary in the mundane.
Perhaps it was the development method that suggested a certain focus on dramatic process over the end result. Caution and restraint must be exercised to ensure that Glimpse doesn’t become a kind of acting versatility showcase with emotions turned up to 11.
Tying unrelated characters together seemed at times disingenuous and echoed that tiresome Hollywood trend of a few years ago of films with large, ensemble casts where in the last five minutes the characters all turned out to be connected to each other.
This stretched the believability of Glimpse and in the light of the production’s extreme naturalism, begged the question: why is this work onstage and not onscreen? Live mediums offer the chance to explore the fantastical, to play with and bend and break convention. There were moments of deftness and craft on show, but these were overshadowed by melodrama and an outmoded approach to theatrical form.
Glimpse contains some solid performances and an ambitious collaborative process that must be applauded. Given that this is their first production, it will be interesting to see how this actors’ company develops.
Rating: 2 ½ stars out of 5
Glimpse
Devised and performed by The Kin Collective
Directed by Laura Maitland
Consulting Director: Noni Hazlehurst
Cast: Michala Banas, Marg Downey, Keith Brockett, Linc Hasler, Laura Maitland, Mark Diaco and Tom Barton.
fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
14 November – 2 December
