In the week where Elliott Rodgers went on a killing rampage in a planned retribution towards women who wouldn’t sleep with him, the themes of this play are horribly timely. From the morbid mind of writer/director Daniel Lammin, who has previously also written work based on the James Bulger murder and the Columbine massacre, The Cutting Boys is inspired by a horrific true story in St Petersburg where two 20-year old men murdered a school girl. Not the sort of thing that will appeal to a massive audience.
The play explores the tenuous sexual psyches of two young men, Max (Nicholas Colla) and Yuri (Nigel Langley) and their friendship with a teenage girl called Kat (Ilana Charnelle Gelbart) that turns into a dangerous obsession.
The Cutting Boys starts gently enough. The two men are each sitting quietly on a small chair and don’t say a word for quite a while. But clearly something big has happened. There is a body lying in the bath, which is surrounded by bottles of booze. The scene asks questions that become answered during the play. The two begin to speak to Kat as her dead ghost emerges from the bath, and the circumstances around her death are slowly revealed.
Max and Yuri have a frenetic energy on stage. Colla and Langley have good rapport, their spitfire banter conveying an easy, long-term friendship and youthful high energy which helps make the play’s climax almost unbearably loud and frenetic, especially in such a small theatre as La Mama. They are young and without many prospects – Max is a florist with a history of psychological issues, and Yuri is a butcher – a trade that becomes gruesomely useful later in the play. They become enchanted by a schoolgirl they see, they approach her in an embarrassingly bumbling way, but somehow she responds and the three begin to hang out. There are some surreal moments where Gelbart becomes other characters including one of the boys’ mothers. The Freudian implications of these parts of the script are a bit clunky but Gelbart negotiates the transition of the characters with skill.
As a writer, Lammin seems to be attempting to understand the young mens’ behaviour, but the play’s climax is so bizarrely over-the-top to be bewildering and disconcerting.
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
The Cutting Boys
Written and directed by Daniel Lammin
Produced by Anastasia Ryan
Lighting design by Brendan Jellie
Sound design by James Hogan
Performed by Nicholas Colla, Nigel Langley and Ilana Charnelle Gelbart
La Mama Theatre, Faraday St, Carlton
www.lamama.com.au
28 May – 8 June
