★★★★☆
Scenes from a Friendship is produced by Outhouse Theatre Co and presented at the Old Fitz. There is something immediately appealing about its theatrical proposition. Staged in traverse, it seats the audience on either side of the playing space and invites them into the geography of a friendship spanning four decades.
Actors move between the seating banks, objects are retrieved from cardboard boxes embedded in the space, and audience members are occasionally addressed directly. We are asked to participate rather than simply observe.
Director Craig Baldwin’s decision to stage the work in traverse upturns the conventions of the Old Fitz’s usual mainstage experience: a stage that sits empty in the light until the house goes dark and the actors appear, and an evening we can pretty easily file as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘thought-provoking’.
The intimacy and immediacy here are terrific, but they don’t follow through into anything, though. We are brought close to the friendship but never asked to do more than watch it.
Baldwin’s set design carries the action through time with the labelled cardboard boxes, each holding the ephemera of a particular moment: disposable cameras, shifting generations of mobile phones, aided with the music of different eras, all summoning the nostalgia of childhood and adolescence.
These details are charming. They mark the passage of time without conveying what passing through it costs the people themselves. The boxes eventually become a laboured way of moving between scenes, adding length to a production that runs past ninety minutes and feels overextended.
Thomas Campbell gives a nuanced performance as Billy and carries much of the play’s emotional weight. His handling of the play’s first revelation about Billy is one of many of the production’s finely judged moments.
Ainslie McGlynn brings warmth and presence to Jess and is at her best at the Edinburgh Fringe party, where Jess realises she doesn’t belong. The chemistry between the two is undeniable. I should confess that both are friends of mine, and the lived-in sense of history the promotional material promises is every bit as evident on stage.
Jane Upton’s play mines the ups and downs of a lifelong friendship: its intimacy, its betrayals, the different worlds we come to inhabit. Billy’s path runs from a successful drama school audition to a pivot into representation and, finally, a need for family. Jess moves from a lack of confidence to finding her own artistic voice.
The trajectories are clear, but they register as milestones ticked off rather than discoveries made. In her program note, Upton reveals that the play began with a childhood friend who, while training as a therapist, started interrogating the relationships in his life.
Anxious about what this meant for their friendship, and unable to afford therapy, she asked if she could write a play instead. It’s a revealing origin, and perhaps an explanatory one: this is a play that approaches a friendship without submitting it to interrogation.
The actors make us believe in the friendship, but the writing doesn’t excavate the depths the subject promises. The emotional territory is familiar, and the play settles for sentiment where complexity was available.
The resolution, with the two families planning to holiday together, ties things off comfortably. It mistakes longevity for depth. Knowing someone for forty years is not a dramatic revelation. What matters is what that knowledge exposes, what it costs, and whether it changes either person.
Two engaging performances and an inventive staging make for an affable evening in Scenes From A Friendship, but the friendship at the centre is left unexamined.
Scenes From A Friendship is presented by Outhouse Theatre Co and runs to 22 November at the Old Fitz Theatre. 129 Dowling Street Woolloomooloo NSW 2011.
Tickets are available here.
Website: https://www.oldfitztheatre.com.au/scenes-from-a-friendship
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/outhousetheatreco/ and https://www.instagram.com/oldfitztheatre/
Photo credits: Richard Farland
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