Theatre Review – Pirandello at Belvoir

By Veronika Dillon on January 31, 2012 in Arts

The idea for Buried City comes from Toronto, Canada and fundamentally it’s a good idea. Buried City is meant to be a show, Belvoir Street are rightly reluctant to call it a play, about ownership. It is set in ‘the gutted façade of a building primed for redevelopment’ where six people are supposedly competing for the right to own the building, in effect the right to choose the future. This is of course relevant in any society where forces of multiculturalism compete with each other to shape the future although it is hardly a new idea. Even in Australia, a country enamoured of its White Australia policy until finally abolished under Harold Holt in 1966, multiculturalism has been around decades. The show’s message that only one culture can win is one of its many disappointments. The fact that there’s nothing left to win is another.

There are six characters on stage and it’s tempting here to think of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, for as the evening progresses its obvious that this is a show in need of an author. This lack of direction would be perfectly fine if the characters on stage were more than just stereotypes but they’re not. Even Russell Keifel, who virtually carries the whole show, is nothing more than a formulaic rendition of a clapped-out excuse for Australia’s once great union movement.

A reliable source told me that the actors themselves wrote the dialogue and whilst they have done their best to invest their characters with meaning it is as if they have written their dialogue in a vacuum and paid little attention to what their co-workers on the stage might be doing. There is little or no significant interaction between the characters even the sexually abusive relationship between the first white settler and the aboriginal boy, close to being the only relationship in the show, is not clearly spelt out until the end of the show. The most convincing evidence that these six actors were preparing a dialogue that would be used in the same show is that pretty much all of them use the f word about three times per sentence. After about ten minutes this device is worn and tired and has lost all impact.

Despite Edward Docx’s confident announcement in Prospect magazine last year made on the strength of an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Postmodernism – Style and Subversion 1970-1990, that postmodernism is dead we shouldn’t get our hopes up too soon. And the impenetrability of Derrida aside there’s a lot to be said for postmodernism, we don’t always need to have plot and providing we can argue convincingly we can read what we like into texts, make our own meanings but in order for this to be a valid process we’ve got be given more to work with than what we get in Buried City.

Last week Ira Glass, producer of the wonderful This American Life spoke at the Sydney Town Hall. For an hour and half he talked of the importance of narrative, the importance of wanting to know what happens next. The problem with Buried City is that you don’t want to know what happens next because its patently obvious from about ten minutes in, that nothing much is happening at all.

Perry Keyes sings with his usual raw emotion but even he can’t save the show.

Buried City is playing at the Belvoir Street Theatre until February 5.