By Jason Romney
Play: Sweet Phoebe
Playwright: Michael Gow
Director: Michael Gow
Production: Playbox presents the Sydney Theatre Company production
Cast: Cate Blanchett (Helen), Colin Moody (Frazer)
Assistant director: Lee Biolos
Designer: Robert Kemp
Lighting Designer: Mark Shelton
Stage Manager: Deborah Munn
STC Touring Mechanist: Marcus Kelson
Technician: Stuart McKenzie
Season and venue: Playbox, 117 Sturt Street, South Melbourne
Synopsis: the psychological well-being of a yuppie couple disintegrates when they lose a dog they're looking after for a friend
Rating: ***
Notes:
The Age review, by Guy Rundle, was published 27 February, 1995. Rundle began by comparing Sweet Phoebe with other works by playwright Gow. Rundle mentions Furious and Away. He slots Furious into a genre of "emptiness and futility" (White, David Ireland, Carey and Sewell are mentioned). Sweet Phoebe he compares to a Raymond Carver short story (adverting to the play's "minimalism"). Of the performances, Rundle says Blanchett and Moody are "no more than competent in their roles"; as to the production's impact overall, he finishes on an upbeat, saying that he found within the play "a deeply moving power" but strikes an ambiguous note: "What within me it connected with, and whether it would do so for a significant number of others, I have no idea".
Jason Romney:
This play is the story of two middle to upper class Australian yuppies (she an interior decorator, he an advertising executive). A significant portion of the play establishes the nature of their life together - it is insular and somewhat superficial, played out in a large, affluent modern home.
They seem to have a vigorous sex life, conducted along what the play suggests is an often repeated pattern. She undoes his tie. He makes a creepy hand movement towards her breast - and off they go.
Apart from this, much of the play's early development catalogues their secure and rather uninteresting domestic "bliss". The purpose is presumably to establish that they have carefully excluded the "real world" from their lives as far as possible. This excluded world includes emotional conflict. Both Helen and Frazer work hard to put into practise the emotional management techniques of touchie-feelie American pop-psychology.
These scenes are protracted and far too long drawn out to serve their modest purpose - a contrast with the explosive emotional chaos that ensues when this couple lose the dog they are looking after for a friend.
Once their lives are torn apart by this development, both Helen and Frazer change completely. Helen becomes withdrawn. Frazer (rather quickly) has an affair while searching for the dog. He also stalks around the house making extremely aggressive speeches about sundry matters, not least his efforts to find the missing hound.
Any catapult into the twilight zone along these lines will inevitably be intriguing. I suppose it doesn't matter that from what we have seen during the play up to the point at which chaos takes hold, the responses by Frazer and Helen are peculiarly lacking in objective correlative. The exaggeration and nastiness make for interesting theatre, but are hardly warranted by what has gone before in the play.
The intense feelings of alienation and despair that prey on both Helen and Frazer are presumably something which most people will have experienced (perhaps partially) from time to time. In real life, such feelings are more likely to explode in response to, say, a business that collapses with failed bank loans and a general inability for the family to go on functioning as before.
In this case, the playwright must work hard to create a satisfactory link between the loss of a friend's dog and the emotionally savagery that ensues. If the seeds had been sown already through some other mechanism, we get no glimpse of them or it in the play's leadup.
While it is true that actors with a deeper developed capacity for tragedy might have added greater stature and poetic flight to the production, Blanchett and Moody are clearly trying to create an emotional disintegration which is connected with the personas they are asked by the script to establish in the play's early stages. An advertising executive does not clearly translate into a King Lear, no matter what the provocation - and especially when the catalyst concerned is merely the loss of a dog.
The broken Frazer is a character more in alignment with, say, the Michael Douglas role in the film, Falling Down, but with a greater yuppie and perhaps also, Australian, flavor - and, by necessity, more theatrical flair.
It is these factors which prevent this production from making its mark as one of Gow's better works. It is no Away - nor, even, anywhere near as interesting and satisfying as Furious. Still, it is likely to strike a partially familiar note in the heart of anyone who has been buffetted by circumstances beyond their control and felt their secure, happy life slip away