East Coast Theatre Company, Belvoir Downstairs, February 27
In a room in Oslo, with a chair, a window and barely a right angle in sight (design Karla Urizar), boy (Tamblyn Lord) arrives to meet up with his mother (Vanessa Downing).
He stands at the door, motionless, undemonstrative and curt. As she says several times: "You're not exactly talkative."
She is his physical polar opposite, shifting around the space with a well-practised charm.
She prattles, mostly at the start about the house and her high-powered public service job and the country and what she thinks of other women.
Underneath the coy social seduction, she is almost proud of her misogyny, despite her claims to support feminism.
The Norwegian poet and dramatist Jon Fosse has written a marvellous exercise in understatement, a poetic and skilful drama of subtexts and gaps.
There is much surface material - about the boy's study, his sexuality or lack thereof, her career, her thoughts on gender, her ambitions and the absent father's new life. Most important is her abandonment of him (her career, you understand) after birth, to live with her Christian fundamentalist mother, and then with his dad.
There are fascinating tensions between these two, ranging from a faintly uncomfortable remembrance of his youthful desire to sleep on her breasts, the possibility of him being an unwanted pregnancy, to her fervent desire for him to stay and share a bottle of wine.
They're two people related to each other who have nothing in common - certainly nothing (in this theatrical world) as prosaic as love. They are strangers joined by an accident of birth decades ago, with her floundering in the tribulations of memory, and him wondering whether it would have been better not to be born.
May-Brit Akerholt's translation from Norwegian works subtly with the rhythms and vocabulary of Australian Engish inside a very spare and poetic structure. Both actors relish the words they speak - Lord is excellent with his silences punctuated with simple refusal and occasional anger. Downing is superb as the coquettish, faintly desperate mother, seeking affirmation of her vanity from her disinterested offspring.
Joseph Uchitel directs simply, keeping a tight control on the spatial relations (at the end of this 50-minute visit, mum and spawn are in almost mirror positions from the start) and an even tighter grasp on the subtlety.
It's an enticing and beautifully acted drama of the spaces between polite conversation, a fascinating exercise in text and subtext.
Towards the end, it's revealed that the mother's favourite story is Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. Such is Fosse's honed economy that in one such detail an entire character can, by reference to an older, more complicated and nuanced play, be further revealed. Devastation is in the details, spoken and/or unspoken.
Until March 16.