martyn coutts

Burnt
La Mama
Melbourne Fringe Festival
24th September 2008

In the newly saved La Mama theatre, I saw a play by Tony Zeane (his first play to be performed), Burnt. Directed by Nick Parsons.

What began as a really interesting character driven piece slowly descended into a one idea show about gambling. The slide from one to the other happened slowly, but I do remember one particular point thinking “oh, this is a play about gambling”. I guess the fact that it took a while to register this was a positive thing.

The performances and direction generally were good – connected, physically comfortable and engaging with the material. But the drift of the script diminished what could have been a great show.

When the piece began I genuinely believed that the piece was going to take us down an interesting path that actually questioned where we were in the space. The backroom is made up to look like a kitchen and the table looked like a cafe table, an older woman comes out polishing a bowl. With the actual clink and clank of the nearby restaurants on Lygon street, I was thinking “ahhh, what new territory are you opening up here?”. Then Nick the main character asks his mum what she is doing polishing that bowl and that she has been doing it for five minutes – again a questioning of the actual action which therefore leads us as audience to question the fiction of what is happening and look to the reality of it. This sort of schism very rarely opens in regular text based works and I thought for a moment that we were dealing with something special, something that would have lifted us out of the safety of the fourth wall and standard audience/performer contxt.

Unfortunately this is where all such hope died, it seemed more a happy accident that probably occurred in my brain more than anywhere on stage. Indeed there were  other times that things became raw and broke out – and this was where props did not behave, or actors adlibbed off of skittish or dropped lines. Like a veneer being tarnished, suddenly you see the undercoat and are startled by its reality.

But, I guess it is not always about what I want to see is it? Well in this space it is about what I want to see, because it is called martyncoutts.com and vanity can surely be unleashed from this place. Perhaps.

I think some of my favourite character driven pieces are about nothing in particular, sure things matter to them and there are definite ideas that are being turned over but in the end you cant say Mike Leigh’s Naked is about X or that Dumb Type’s Memorandum is about Y. Because they are about a lot of things and also nothing. Even Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting which is apparently about Heroin addiction I actually think is more about friendship.

In the first scene of Burnt there is a very well performed Mother and Son scene between Iris Walshe Howling and Chris Buchanan. Very warm, open and honest. And it wasn’t really about anything, it was two people sharing space and sharing it with us. I was totally engaged, loved it. But by the third scene the show was about one thing – gambling and the only thing keeping me engaged were the performances of the actors including the very funny Kieran King.

The set, lighting and sound were adequate but nothing to write home about. I can honestly say that I haven’t seen a use of La Mama that has blown me away visually. Admittedly I haven’t seen enough theatre in there, but I hope that I do one day see  a completely new use of the space. I hope the effort to save the space is paid off in the future with a revitalised view of how the space can be used.