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Tahki Saul and Zindzi Okenyo |
Cameron Goodall and Tahki Saul |
POSTED: 07 OCTOBER 2011 Money Shots, by Angus Cerini, Tahli Corin, Duncan Graham, Rita Kalnejais, Zoe Pepper | Directed by Sarah Giles Sydney Theatre Company | Wharf 2, Walsh Bay, Sydney | Until 15 October Money Shots consists of five short new works by emerging Sydney playwrights, commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company and all thematically inspired and linked by the idea of money. Director Sarah Giles is in charge of this curated collection of five plays, which begins with How to Get Very Clean, by Rita Kalnejais. It’s an emotional exchange between a house cleaner and her dead client’s son, examining links, mainly through dialogue, between grief and desire, and ironically the importance of being touched. Duncan Graham’s No Exit From The Roof is a purposefully disjointed look at a young couple facing marriage and a financial crisis. The final line — “It feels like throwing a coin off a roof and seeing moments of it as it falls to the ground and smashes into a million pieces” — is an accurate summation of both its style and themes. The Arcade is Tahli Corin’s coming-of-age realism play set in an amusement arcade at the end of the 1980s, where an obsession with gaming is replaced by an obsession with love. Perhaps the most pedestrian of the pieces. Drill Down is an effective dreamlike piece about mortality, penned by Angus Cerini and dealing with heavyweight themes such as revenge and mortality in a theatrically engaging mode. The highlight of the evening for me was Fiddler’s Coin, a surreal comedy about a family financially obsessed and divided by — you’ve guessed it — money! It is whimsical and arguably the most adventurous of the five pieces which the play’s author Zoe Pepper directs and devises with the STC’s Residents. All performance by the Residents — Cameron Goodall, Julia Channessian, Zindzi Okenyo, Richard Pyros, Sophie Ross and Tahki Saul — are, as always, faultless. Not everything worked but the pluses far outweighed the minuses and one has to remember that these are really vignettes as opposed to high-budget plays. The writers, performers, and creative contributors are all under 35 and they raise some interesting ideas about the power of the dollar — what can’t be bought, the correlation between your bank balance and self worth, and the fine line between working for money and prostituting yourself. They are very in tune with contemporary reality and it is a credit — pardon the pun — to the STC that these young artists are allowed to experiment on the grand stage of Wharf 2.
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All images: Brett Boardman ©2011
Richard Pyros and Sophie Ross |
Richard Pyros and Sophie Ross |
Cameron Goodall and Julia Ohannessian |
