Bug
The Sunday Age
Sunday September 4, 2005
WHERE: Red Stitch Actors Theatre, St Kilda East. Tel: 9533 8083 WHEN: To September 24 TICKETS: $25/$15 ***
In playwright Tracy Lett's Bug Agnes White (Kat Stewart) sits in the motel room she has moved into to get away from her abusive ex-con husband Jerry (Joe Clements). Her friend RC (Ella Caldwell) brings a friend of hers, Peter (Dave Whiteley), and they strike up a wary quasi-romance.Peter is strange on first sight and gets stranger all the time. He has some conspiracy theories he wants to get off his chest and he is also obsessed with the bedbug he finds; soon he has the microscope out and is talking about how the government has sent the bugs to invade the room.The US writer's play, which is being adapted for the cinema by veteran director William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection), is a kind of sci-fi grand guignol that seems to come from somewhere midway between Sam Shepard and the X-Files. It is full of gruesome visual effects (you may flinch when Peter reveals the wounds he has inflicted on himself trying to dig the bugs out of his skin) and at times you feel yourself hemmed in by the play's schizo-dramaturgy, ably realised by director Martin White. (It is not just Peter who is hung up on bugs; soon Agnes is as well, although no one else can see them.) It works as a shocker; it is a genuinely unwholesome experience. I'm not sure quite what it has to say about the themes it deals with apart, perhaps, from being another sermon on William Carlos Williams' poem The pure products of America go crazy. Kat Stewart and Dave Whiteley make a fine couple in their folie a deux and the other three actors support them well.
© 2005 The Sunday Age