Daniel Keene is an Australian playwright not only known for his literary brilliance, but renowned for his poetic, lyrical use of text, and his striking perception of language. He is a most talented writer, and his plays have been performed widely throughout Australia and overseas.
The Europeans love him (the French in particular), and his plays, which include All Souls, Cho Cho San, Silent Partner, Low, Terminus, The Architect’s Walk and The Ninth Moon, have received numerous literary awards.
The critics too know this dramatist is for real. Fashioning language is Daniel Keene’s trade, and the playwright approaches it with visceral intensity. You can almost imagine him pulling a red-hot word from a furnace, hammering it into shape and laying it down on the page to cool. So says the Sydney Morning Herald.
So when I went to see the Melbourne Theatre Company’s Life Without Me – Keene’s first MTC production, I was excited on two counts. First that this must be a sign the MTC is taking that daring and exploratory step of moving past its usual form to something more cerebral, more literate. And too that Keene must be at that next stage in his career where he feels comfortable to work within the mores and concerns of an established entity like the MTC.
The end result however was not satisfying. And I’m not sure if this is a case of the theatre company and the playwright just not being a good fit for each other, or if the well-established culture of the MTC just washed over a text that Keene would have probably written differently for another space and another audience.
The story of Life Without Me in essence is simple. It follows a collection of characters all brought accidentally and coincidentally to a hotel through circumstance, one of which is the weather. And they discover the hotel offers them sanctity from the problems in their lives – existential crisies where identity and place and worth are at the foundation of their discontent.
In the end however this production doesn’t seem to sit together well. First up it seems miscast, with Robert Menzies sometimes delving into pantomime-like gestures as the concierge of the tired old hotel, and Greg Stone as the man pushed into the hotel by a gust of wind, falling too easily into dramatic (bewildered) wit to gain a laugh, (when there is so much more pathos to his story). The dialogue too, which does offer beauty and insight, is sometimes handled awkwardly by the actors.
Some nuance and subtlety is offered courtesy of the three female characters. Deidre Rubenstein is a woman looking to start a new life, Kristina Brew is a young wife looking to leave an old life behind, and Kerry Walker is an old woman looking to only remember particular things at the end stage of her life. However in general the points are laboured.
The text of Life Without Me reminds me of the works of one of Italy’s most distinguished writers Luigi Pirandello (1867 –1936), and his work Six Characters in Search of an Author, which follow to a degree the elements of Theatre of the Absurd.
Six Characters as explicitly put in the title of the play, is a story waiting to be told if only someone of strength (a writer) could be found to tell it. And Pirandello, this Nobel winning playwright, is said to have created work where words are unreliable and reality can be at the same time (both) true and false.
Similarly it seems (to me at least) Keene’s characters do have a story to tell, however Keene’s words, his text, his thoughts, and his reality seem in this instance to have been overcome by the form.
Life Without Me
Sumner Theatre
9 October – 21 November
2 hours 30 minutes including a 20-minute interval
