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Theatre company The Sally Collective’s website states, ‘We call bullshit on modern theatre. We are fucking bored. We are all about remarkably unremarkable theatre, obsessed with being honest … Tis theatre for our generation.’ Its new production, Scapegoat, might not quite live up to these bold claims, but this is still an ambitious and robust piece of work.
The young cast portrays a group of twenty-somethings grappling with the eternal dilemmas of this life stage: forging a personal identity; choosing a path from a bewilderingly vast range of options; negotiating sometimes-volatile friendships and relationships; managing the challenges of adulthood while still emerging from adolescence.
Scapegoat is a highly physical production. Actors climb scaffolding, bounce on planks, swing from rope ladders and hammer at a xylophone to demonstrate the characters’ childlike playfulness. This playfulness often turns boisterous and even aggressive, as the characters’ underlying desperation shows through the cracks.
Writer and co-director Hannah Monson has eschewed traditional character development for a more impressionistic, experimental approach. The script was developed from interviews with thirty-odd people in their early twenties, which was then used to create a questionnaire for the ensemble members. Their answers were used during rehearsal to create characters through improvisation.
This process has inspired several exciting sequences, most memorably a festival setting where characters follow their own tangents, oblivious to the bliss or distress of their friends. Unfortunately, the sequences feel like just that – unconnected moments that fail to add up to a coherent whole or take us on a sustained journey.
Production designer Caspar Conrick uses the Grange theatre’s huge warehouse to great effect, and his inventiveness mostly serves the show’s themes. Occasionally though, the temptation for spectacle overcomes dramatic necessity, as when an actor enters by driving a car halfway into the space, to no purpose that wouldn’t have been accomplished by simply walking in. Later, a conversation takes place in this car which is inaudible to everyone else in the room. Presumably this is a deliberate choice, but it’s hard to see what it achieves beyond frustrating the audience.
A related issue is the Grange’s acoustics. Since actors aren’t miked and the stage area is in the middle of the room with audience seating on either side, a lot of dialogue is completely lost on the far side of the room, or drowned in general cacophony when – as frequently happens – multiple actions are happening simultaneously. This problem is particularly acute because unless yelling, the cast do not project their voices. Certainly this creates a naturalistic effect, but since this is often at the expense of hearing the words at all, it seems a high price to pay for realism. This is a pity, since many audible lines are frequently very poignant, funny or both.
Despite its flaws, Scapegoat is an audacious, energetic production, and The Sally Collective is to be commended for its willingness to flout convention and take risks.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Scapegoat
The Sally Collective
Artistic directors: Rhys James, Hannah Monson
Ensemble Members: Molly Dyson, Eidann Glover, Brendan Snow, Leo Thompson, Soren Tromp
Production Design: Caspar Conrick
Venue: The Grange Theatre, Grange Place, Melbourne 3000
27 November – 6 December
