★★★★☆
Mary Rachel Brown’s 2010 play The Dapto Chaser makes its Ensemble Theatre debut at a time when the greyhound industry is shrinking under the weight of past indiscretions (to put it mildly) and a vanishing working class.
It’s a play that examines the damage gambling wreaks on families, and the strength it takes to survive when faith in everything you know proves misguided. It’s a play that loves its characters, flaws and all. And it’s bloody funny.
The Sinclair family are battlers, weighed down, kept down, by years of poor decisions, chasing dreams that are never realised, gambling everything on the hope of a big payday that will lift them out of a cycle of “poorness”. The lure of the next race, the way up and out, is an illusion.
They will never get there because greyhound racing is a mug’s game. Still, they have one thing in their favour. It’s called Boy Named Sue, a potential champion dog.
On to a stage rich in dusty memorabilia – old trophies and medals, half-eaten toasties and empty beers – shuffles the emaciated frame of Errol Sinclair (Peter Carroll). He sinks into the centre-stage recliner rocker from where he holds court over his youngest son Jimmy (André de Vanny).
Errol is dying from lung cancer even as he stubbornly smokes and drinks. He has spent his life gambling on the dogs and has nothing to show for it, to Jimmy’s immense frustration and despair.
Carroll, in another superbly shaded performance, is mesmerising as the irascible Errol, alternately indignant (feigned or not), bullying, selfishly deluded and sentimental. It is a memorable turn.
Jimmy stoically tolerates his father’s behaviour. As the younger son, he’s become inured to it, but it’s to de Vanny’s credit that Jimmy presents as no milksop. De Vanny shows a steeliness behind Jimmy’s forbearance, so that it’s no surprise when ultimately Jimmy has the courage to make a decisive call.
While Jimmy doesn’t really belong in the game, his brother Cess (Justin Rosniak) has greyhound racing in his blood. He has the ‘gift’ and in Boy Named Sue a potential answer to their intergenerational poverty. He also has dreams of becoming a player, but standing in his way is Errol’s old nemesis, Arnold Denny (Marco Chiappi).
Denny is an oily operator and, in Chiappi’s hands, hilariously untroubled by self-awareness. However, Chiappi never lets us forget the ruthlessness behind the vanity. Denny has the money and “it’s a buyer’s market.”
Poor Cess is literally in another class. At heart he’s not a creative cheat like his father, nor a genuine player like Denny. And we know from the moment he settles comfortably in Errol’s armchair how this will end.
Two different brothers favoured unequally by their father is an old trope, but Anna Houston’s cracking direction really lifts this production. Both Houston and Brown have a clear understanding of the absurd quixotic attachment to lost causes of some male interactions.
Brown, especially, is attuned to the rich language of the dog-racing milieu. Performed on the tight Ensemble stage, the brothers’ battle for survival in a world changing fast is combustible. Rosniak again displays his terrific comedic timing and physicality, and in de Vanny he has the perfect foil. They really work well together.
Scripted as a series of one-on-ones, the assured performances from all four actors utterly zing.
Simone Romaniuk’s set design evokes a sense of a time rapidly passing even as the Sullivan’s home appears fixed in aspic. Emphasising this motif, Matt Cox lights it in a nostalgic warm glow. You can almost smell the crust of privation emanating from Romaniuk’s costuming.
Complementing the refrain of an era passing is video designer Aron Murray’s projection of grainy TV racing footage. Indeed, the sounds of the racetrack are never far away in Madeleine Picard’s almost subliminal sound design.
Boy Named Sue is a phantom never seen by the audience but interacted with by the characters, its visibility as insubstantial as the unrealistic hopes and desperate dreams projected onto it. A faint audio snuffling is the only clue to its presence.
While the comedy is well worth the price of admission, there is, I feel, a level of darkness and despair that remains unexplored. The reckoning between the brothers is bruisingly cathartic, but a more acute feeling of desperation leading to this point would elevate this production even further.
Nevertheless, The Dapto Chaser is an uproariously funny, sad, and poignant tale of a cultural tradition fading into history; wonderfully acted and directed.
The Dapto Chaser is presented by Ensemble Theatre and runs to 25 July. 78 McDougall Street Kirribilli NSW 2061.
Tickets are available here.
Website: https://www.ensemble.com.au/shows/the-dapto-chaser/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/ensembletheatre/
Photo credits: Prudence Upton
Watch the trailer for The Dapto Chaser here:
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