By Reviewed by Jason Blake
Sydney Theatre Company
Wharf 1, August 18
Krew Boylan at the Sydney Theatre Company, where she is appearing in Tusk Tusk.Credit: Marco Del Grande
Until September 4
THERE'S no escape from unhappy families on our stages this year. The precocious English playwright Polly Stenham's debut play That Face (which played at Belvoir St in February) presented us with maternal dysfunction writ large.
In Stenham's second play, Tusk Tusk, another troubled mother has flown the coop a week ago, we learn, leaving her children to fend for themselves in the London flat they moved into just days before.
Surrounded by cardboard boxes - which become items of furniture, play forts and hidey-holes as the story unfolds - Eliot, 15, Maggie, 14, and little brother Finn, 7, create a precarious, self-sustaining fantasy of family life.
Like Max in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (from which Stenham draws some telling images), Finn is always being sent to bed without his supper. It's not that he's being naughty, it's because Eliot is trying to keep the noise down to avoid being reported to the authorities. At the same time, Eliot's paternal instincts are being stretched out of shape by a new girlfriend, Cassie, which in turn forces Maggie to compete, ever more shrilly, for his attention.
Punctuating the production with jolts of indie rock, director Shannon Murphy draws lively and heartfelt performances from Miles Szanto (Eliot) and Airlie-Jane Dodds (Maggie) without entirely overcoming their rawness. Kai Lewins played Finn on opening night and did so extremely well (he alternates the role with Zac Ynfante). Only Marta Dusseldorp's concerned neighbour, Katie, feels off the mark, marching in as she does at the climax like an update of The Good Life's Penelope Keith.
It's dark material, palpably angry at times, though Stenham's gallows levity and her fluency in teen snarkiness conspires to keep the tone jarringly bright.
It's very fluent storytelling, too, though not yet to the point where we are unaware of its mechanics as Stenham drives towards an ambiguous ending that leaves us suspended between hope and dread.