Motortown. By Red Stitch Actors Theatre
The Sunday Age
Sunday December 9, 2007
Motortown. By Red Stitch Actors Theatre. Cnr Dandenong Rd & Chapel St, St Kilda. $30/$20. Until December 22. Tel. 9533 8083. 4/5
War isn't hell. If Red Stitch's current production is to be believed - as it should be - the conventional drama vilifying combat is just a distraction. The real perdition is what comes after. When Danny comes home to his crappy town in Essex, he's really got nothing bad to say about his tour of duty in Basra. The way he puts it, Iraq was mostly ginger beer and shenanigans with the lads. He does seem a little haunted and sometimes goes red-faced and intense when reminiscing, but that's probably nothing. He is also obsessed with a girl he'd been dating briefly before he went off fighting. When he finds out she's not interested any more, and then he gets a gun from some dodgy London types, you begin to wonder if Danny hasn't maybe left a little bit of himself back in Basra. Brit playwright Simon Stephens doesn't pull any punches with this, the first feel-bad hit of summer. Motortown is an unapologetic noughties update of Buchner's classic anti-war play, Woyzeck, filtered through the post-Vietnam warning calls of Taxi Driver, Coming Home and even a bit of Rambo: First Blood. Luckily, even though you may feel like you've seen it all before, you don't really get much of a chance to rest your peepers because the level of tension, along with the A-grade performances, is shock and awe stuff. From the measured build-up tracking Danny's complex mental state to the honestly unnerving violence that forms the work's moral centre, there's little to fault in this production. The script is possessed of laugh-out-loud dialogue perfectly counterpoised with the awfulness that unfolds, and the cast get their teeth into it without overplaying at all. Brett Cousins is brilliant as Danny, on stage for the entire show and only ever less than riveting when sharing the space with his hypnotically watchable brother, Lee (Dion Mills). It's a hard show to stomach - the visceral violence, exaggerated profanity and sheer anger of the piece can't be absolved - but nobody shirks their duties here and the audience is left to patch up their wounds as best they can.
© 2007 The Sunday Age