Critical Acclaim: Living and Dying with a Big Heart

Show name: This Is Living
Company Name: Big hART
Venue: Derwent Entertainment Centre, Glenorchy
Date: 31 March
Reviewer: Mark Cutler

This Is Living is self-described as a new and immersive performance piece. If you are puzzled by this description, let me put it another way. This Is Living is a theatre show born out of community consultation which explores ageing, love, connection, dying, the generation gulf between seniors and young teens utilising live music, poetry, skateboarding, stark staging, photography, dance and I’m sure I saw a kitchen sink in there somewhere! You get the idea ... it is a bold and complex show. But at its heart is a simple yet ever so compelling story of a lifelong deception/ revelation involving the three principal characters.

Writer/ director Scott Rankin is fast approaching the status of local/ national wunderkind ... yes, wunderkind despite his greying pate and the fact that he’s been at this sort of thing for over fifteen years now. His body of work with Big hART is impressive and the company has a richly deserved respect among the broad theatre community. However I suspect Rankin could not give two or even one hoot about reputation, for him and the company, process is the big ticket item here ... well involvement in the process to be more accurate. Whether it be aboriginal issues involving transience and cultural obligation for younger indigenous people (Ngapartji, Ngapartji), “autocide” among young Tasmanian men (Drive) or even plain old spectacle (Junk Theory), Big hART is in there, sleeves rolled up, asking communities to share their stories. Theatre with dirty fingernails!

But back to This Is Living. With a cast of at least thirty, involving only three principal/ professional actors, the show is the product of two years of consultation in four Tasmanian locations- Latrobe, Wynyard, Glenorchy and the Huon Valley. As with any show that includes such a high ratio of so-called amateurs, slickness can’t be the expectation, especially when the production insists on a rotating cast of elderly actors from each of the aforementioned locations. If you are going to involve community, better a pound than a penny! But it is no less affecting for making this choice. The central story I touched on earlier, has Morgan (a fabulous Bruce Myles) and wife Jan (the delectable Anne Grigg), mourning the passing of close friend Ron (the stalwart Lex Marinos). Morgan has recently retired as a photo-journalist and this vocational vacuum forces both he and Jan into confronting their simmering detachment. Wind back a few months to before Ron’s passing and the story unfolds with Ron’s relationship to both characters as the fulcrum.

Eerily interspersed with the central story are the vignettes provided by the thirteen elderly actors. Their presence is beautifully and touchingly ghost-like. Sometimes they create a haunting tableau, other times they move with a spooky detachment. Their muttered reflections are amplified with delay to further enhance a sense of otherworldliness. The production is all the richer for their contributions. The music and songs are provided by The Dunaways, a four-piece band whose score is always at one with the production.

At various times the depth of staging available at the DEC is opened up to reveal young skateboarders and ravers doing their thang in the background. This short, spasmodic involvement smacked of theatrical tokenism. However I must add quickly the production itself did not suffer as a result, more that I was left with a bad feeling of missed opportunity for them and an underwhelming feeling of ... so what! I’m equally sure the teens involvement in the project itself is of immense value to them on other levels.

Whether This Is Living finds a life outside the comfy confines of a festival is doubtful considering the emptiness of the DEC for opening night and the theatrical unsexiness of aging as a topic. This is a pity because, despite some rusty moments on the night, it is a piece both worthwhile and arresting and one that would grow into something better, even greater, given time.

Mark Cutler is a Hobart based writer/performer.