Mutation Theatre
at Theatre Works until March 2
Tom Holloway has written some terrific plays (Beyond the Neck, Red Sky Morning), and although this recent one, Love Me Tender, does possess Holloway’s signature subversive playfulness with narrative logic, overlapping, punchy dialogue, and ambitious anti-theatrics, it just isn’t, finally, all that satisfying.
From the sexualisation of girl-children to a contemporary culture suspicious of a paternal love that ‘ought not speak its name’ to allusions of Euripides’ Iphigenia, to the catastrophic Victorian bushfires of 4 years ago, this play is a real tease but without the pay off.
Amidst a kind of sooty, post apocalyptic Australian bush set – all fire damaged and arid – a father/firefighter, a mother, a policeman and 2 narrators all appear to improvise multiple stories by way of prompts, interjections and multiple ellipses. The ‘final’ story is unclear but at its tragic heart is that of a father’s moral dilemma re his daughter (signal Iphigenia).
It could be terrific. It might be provocative. It should be disquieting. But apart from intermittent flashes of luminous, choric narration and a couple of strong, sure performances from Sarah Ogden and Nick Pelomis, Love Me Tender left me hanging out for a single coherent narrative and some good old fashioned catharsis of the classic Euripidean-kind.
When this production does occasionally manage to get-ahold of Holloway’s obtuse, bold, fragmentary text and run with it, the black humor and wry social commentary are lean-forward-in-your-chair- compelling. But director, Patrick McCarthy (he’s been spot on in the past), does not anchor this script’s potentially delicious anarchy in a secure over all vision.