The ​impressive set we see on arrival in the Malthouse ​Theatre for Timeshare is textbook resort: clean sand, comfortable sun lounges and umbrellas dotted off into the horizon, all rimmed by a moat of blue tiles delineating the resort’s ‘infinity pool’.
But the “timeshare” to which this resort belongs has a double meaning. On this surface, we are at a conventional timeshare resort, a ripe setting for a situation comedy featuring a zealous salesman with vacation weeks to sell, a Shirley Valentine holidaymaker, a deadbeat daughter holidaying with her mother, an ambitious resort dancer and a sexy young man caught in a romantic triangle.
But ​this ​island also shares time at another level: the resort is situated on the International Date Line and visitors are able to holiday in the ‘yesterday villa’ adding a day to their holidays at the cost of reliving a distorted form of yesterday.
Through this mechanism, the situation comedy gives way first to satire, then to absurdism, and finally to a melancholy truth which distils laughter into awareness of our constant and impossible desire to make time in our terribly finite lives.
The infinity pool standing empty is not merely an unusable extravagance but also an impossible dream for characters whose would dearly love to really be able to buy time. The turtles for which the island is famous struggle to complete their annual migration, their world too being less predictable than we might think.
Timeshare is a collaboration between versatile Australian playwright Lally Katz and New York-based director Oliver Butler. The result is an original work which is often funny, ​sometimes thought-provoking, and largely satisfying. Bert LaBonté and Marg Downey hold the stage, he as the increasingly desperate resort manager and she as a holidaymaker facing a return to the real world, a mother of adult children struggling to retain her equanimity in an increasingly unreliable world.
Their younger co-stars Brigid Gallacher and Fayssal Bazzi are each cast in double roles as resort staff and as Downey’s adult children. The resort staff roles are played ​as full-on farce and can become a little tiresome in a work that has much more than farce to offer. The child roles provide a good deal of the plot but are shallow next to LaBonté and Downey’s more developed characters.
But the quick changes of both characters, especially when they dissolve into on-stage minute-by-minute switches show some impressive stage craft and the opening night audience thoroughly enjoyed the game.
Timeshare tries to do a lot and the veering from style to style is not always successful. On several occasions, a cast member broke into a satirical song. Bazzi, who has a magnificent voice and a fabulous deadpan delivery, managed these moments exceptionally well but elsewhere the songs sometimes deteriorated to squirm-provoking.
At its best, however, Timeshare has a Stoppard-like quality about it, throwing up philosophical challenges that catch us mid-laugh and pathos that cuts its sweetness with a pinch of existential angst.
It has a little polish to come but is well worth seeing.
Rating: 3.5 stars out of five
Timeshare
Written by Lally Katz
Directed by Oliver Butler
Malthouse Theatre, Southbank
23 April to 17 May
