It's interesting in a week which saw Peter Wilkins host a forum on independent theatre which featured extensive discussion on how the mainstream theatres limit access for independent voices to see a mainstream theatre picking up a show born out of the independent theatre space Fourtyfivedownstairs in Melbourne brought into the biggest venue of one of Australia's most well funded mainstream theatre companies, given a cast made up of performers whose careers kinda coincide with Australian Theatrical History.
Would that I could say this is a complete triumph. Unfortunately, I think Patricia Cornelius's tough, emotional drama using Scott's doomed Antarctic endeavor as a metaphor for end-of-life regrets and anxieties falls down under the weight of an overly realistic design that only occasionally lets the emotional turmoil bubbling under really rise to the surface. It's a beautiful set by Charles Davis, a beautifully scultpured Antarctic landscape, intimidating and grand and powerful, but it doesn't serve for the shifts between the two realities as our six central explorers shift into isolated people facing their own estrangement from their loved ones and their own memories. It falls into a formal grandeur that takes a while to really feel human - particularly Phillip Quast as the speechifying Scott, who only really starts to melt in the last 20 mintues of the show.
The highlights of the cast, for me, were Vanessa Dowling as the blithely good-natured Wilson, where it only becomes apparent what's hiding beneath the sunny side as we get to know more. Brigid Zhengeni as the mordant Bowers is the youngest of the central group, aware that she should be holding onto the world around her much more than she's actually able to, desparing of what's slipping away. John Gaden and Peter Carroll have the perils of familiarity - there are notes in both their performances that I've seen before in the last 30-odd years of seeing them on Sydney stages, and while neither of them are actively bad, neither give performances that particularly adds to their repertoire.
I'm afraid this felt like a piece that would have hit a lot harder in a smaller venue, and the risk of having to program a season using as big a theatre as the Ros Packer means sometimes shows don't quite go into them as cleanly as they look like they should. Yes, on the surface the grand scale of the Scott expedition should suit the big theater down to the ground, but in reality that's not the play Cornelius has written and it feels awkwardly placed in this theatre.
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