Half and Half by Daniel Keene
Dancing Dog Theatre, Footscray
27th September 2008, 8pm
I saw this one a while ago as well. After checking out the Lonely Instrument I went along to this show in Footscray and I was dreading it – not because of anything I had heard anything bad, but the advertised length of this show was three hours. Call me a member of my generation but I feel like this is a difficult thing for people to be expected to sit through. I know that films are regularly 3 hours and no-one complains about that, but in a live situation where audiences are engaged in a greater way, i feel like three hours is too much. I think they make classes at school less than an hour because that is the maximum attention span for people.
In any case the show only turned out to be 2 1/2 hours long including interval. Having the cafe there open and serving both drinks and food was a good thing also, as the psychological distance of being in Footscray was also taking its toll. (I love Footscray and have worked at Footscray Community Arts Centre a lot, but you cant deny that going there if you live elsewhere feels like you need to pay the troll at the bridge).
Um, the show – I really enjoyed it and in fact would have recommended it to everyone I knew had it not been for the last 20/30 mins. Up until that point the language and pacing was superb, the performers comfortable and believable. There was something gloriously Beckettian about the ‘locked in a cycle’ nature of the characters lives, and yet it could have read as a piece of naturalism as well depending on the take of the director and also the audiences interpretation.
And where it was the script that dragged me into the centre of the story, it was the script that flailed about towards the end. What had been so tight before descended into a mess of clumsy signifiers and choppy short scenes that destroyed the rhythm of the piece. I am all for wierdness and abstraction but it needs to make some sort of internal logical sense and there were sections that just seemed abstract for abstractions sake.
It was such a pity, as I felt like it could have been amazing. There was a sequence of the two brothers creating a garden in their kitchen that was very very beautiful and almost felt like it could have been an ending for the piece. And the investigation into how obsession and love can take you into unchartered territory mentally and emotionally (like digging up your dead mother bit by bit from the cemetary).
