Brothers Wreck

Lisa Flanagan and Rarriwuy Hick. Image by Brett Boardman.

On an ordinary morning in an ordinary Darwin home, Ruben, Adele and Jarrod awake to find cousin Joe hanging from the rafters. The shadow of death is inescapable – from the stain of Joe’s suicide to the threat of Mum’s cancer. Brother’s Wreck is a story about family life enveloped by death.

This is Jada Albert’s first play, and it suffers from many of the problems you would expect from an emerging artist. It is over-written. Too much dialogue and shouting makes the performances come across as over-rehearsed. A lesson to take from this is that a picture tells a thousand words, and as a visual medium, the audience is paying just as much attention to what the characters are doing as to what they are saying. The main flaw from a writing perspective is that there is no catalyst for the emotional change of the main character. The change just happens, unprovoked, and therefore it’s difficult to buy as a genuine emotional revelation.

 On the positive side, the characters are great – genuine, warm, with nicely balanced dynamics within the ensemble. The female characters are a particularly well-drawn example of how to create feminist characters without a feminist agenda. The script is generously peppered with the kind of low-key humour that provides an admirable prophylactic against saccharine sentiment and pretention.

Performances across the board are heavy-handed, over-played and lacking in complexity. What you see is what you get. This is to be expected, considering this play is precisely that– simple, straight down the line, and lacking subtlety. Not surprisingly, it is the older more experienced cast members who help ground performances all-round. The entrance of Lisa Flanagan inspires a two-fold breath of relief, firstly in the context of her character as the matriarch come to reunite family bonds, and secondly as an experienced performer, who’s on-stage confidence and easy-going rhythms help to centre the less experienced performers. Bjorn Stewart provides a lovely understated and calming offset to the melodrama of the central characters. Hunter Page-Lochard in the lead could benefit from some reigning in – nevertheless, he does have some electricity in his wonderfully physical performance.

Production design, lighting and sound are magnificent. Sound is used particularly well, subliminally, fitting with the naturalistic style. Lighting is almost filmic in how it divides spaces and creates scene changes. This very mature and tastefully understated design provides a much-needed glue to hold together the more amateur elements of this production.

For all the flaws however, the one thing that this play and production have in abundance is heart. Heart is difficult to learn, impossible to teach. Experienced artists would kill for and only a handful of younger artists have it in abundance. The heart that shines through, making it almost possible to forgive a structurally flawed, overwritten script and wobbly performances. I am left with the feeling that everyone involved in this production truly believed in the work, truly put their heart into it. So eerily, life mirrors art – in this production we see the collaborators making a flawed thing work by working together – not unlike the characters in the play. This is nowhere near a great work, but there is potential for greatness. Keep watching this space.