Orange Flower Water

Orange Flower Water has now closed. It played at Darlinghurst Theatre from 23 March – 17 April 2011. By Craig Wright, directed by Byron Kaye.

I really, really wanted to like Orange Flower Water at Darlo. I cannot TELL you how much I wanted to like it. I'd read such good things in the reviews and I love Six Feet Under and I have a major soft spot for that little little Darlo stage and I was super excited about going to see it, even though I only managed to squeeze in the Saturday before they closed. Someone compared it to Speaking In Tongues, for heavens' sakes, and we all know how I felt about THAT play.

Lloyd Bradford Syke wrote in his review that:

"You won't just see this play. You'll feel it, deep in the pit of your stomach. If you don't, or can't, relate, you haven't lived."

Well, then, I guess I haven't lived, because as much as I wanted to like this play, it just did nothing for me.

I think you were supposed to identify with the characters, feel their pain. I couldn't. They were all too frustrating. Cathy seemed nice enough, and Amy Mathews turned in a heartfelt performance here. However, her character's run got cut a bit short – you never really saw her after her big scene, which was (as everyone who saw the play knows) the long, drawn out, explicit sex scene with her cheating husband David (Joseph Del Re). There was also nothing wrong with Del Re's performance, except I didn't understand why David fell in love with Beth (Megan Alston), which is obviously at the crux of the character. Whether this fault lies with Del Re or with the writing or the directing... I'm not sure. Perhaps a mixture of all three.

It was easy to understand why Beth fell out of love with her husband Brad (Sebastian Goldspink) as he was completely vile and thoroughly unlikeable. When a character says "I ought to rape you, you f^&*ing c*nt", I think it makes them pretty much irredeemable. Sure, his wife had just announced that she was leaving him and his emotions were running high, so to speak, but yeah... completely unforgiveable. If I was supposed to feel his pain, that ensured I never would, on account of I was too busy loathing him.

So I understood why Beth left Brad for David. All over that. What I didn't understand was why she was crying ALL THE DAMN TIME.

I have very limited patience with crying on stage. The more you cry, the less effective it becomes. It doesn't signal that you're all emotional and fragile and whatnot, because the audience – well, me, anyway – becomes totally inured to it. It's like when you watch Masterchef and they're all standing there having a cry and you don't go 'awwwwww', you go 'LESS CRYING MORE COOKING' because they've been crying for what seems like five episodes now and you just want to see them make a cake without it melting in the rain Macarthur Park style. If Beth had broken down once, maybe twice, then maybe I could have been Team Beth. But no. The way Alston played her, she was CRYING ALL THE TIME. And I didn't sympathise – I wanted to smack her.

Relationships and adultery are territory that has been traversed by many writers many, many times. If you're going to do it and make it stand out, it has to be pretty damn good. The majority of people seemed to think Orange Flower Water was that standout. But it just didn't work for me. There were elements I liked – I thought the set design was inspired, for instance. Setting the whole thing in a bedroom was really clever – a play about an intimate subject deserves an intimate setting, and the smallness of the Darlo theatre lent itself well to the claustrophobic atmosphere, as did the continued presence of all four actors on stage. I thought the performances were mostly very good – Mathews in particular, with an honourable mention for Del Re. Goldspink couldn't really help what an enormous douche Brad was, I suppose, and for the brief minutes when Alston's Beth wasn't in tears she was good.

But the play just didn't live up to the billing. For me to really feel the pain of these characters – to feel it like Lloyd Bradford Syke did – I think I needed to like them a little bit, not spend the play pretty much wanting to punch them. And the ending... no. I'm writing a PhD thesis on romance novels, and it just totally smacked of that bit you get at the end of so many category novels where suddenly the hero and heroine have a baby, signalling their happily ever after. I didn't really feel like anything was resolved by the time David delivered his final 'BTW, we have a baby now and we are OMG SO HAPPY' monologue. In a way, this play touched on the least interesting aspect of adultery, and ended just where it should have begun. Breaking up is, in essence, the easiest part. It's what happens after that was interesting. The play was just beginning to touch on that with David and Beth looking at houses near the end. If the play had begun there, I think it would have been much more interesting.

Maybe it's because the last play I saw about adultery was Speaking In Tongues, which remains one of the greatest shows I have ever seen performed. But Orange Flower Water just did not live up to the hype for me. And to be honest, I feel pretty bad about it, because I love Darlo and I was really, really looking forward to this show. But I didn't feel it. It didn't get me deep in the pit of my stomach. It left me wondering what the hell I'd missed.

Speaking In Tongues

Speaking In Tongues runs until 19 March at the SBW Stables Theatre, Kings Cross. By Andrew Bovell, directed by Sam Strong.

Speaking In Tongues is the closest to a perfect script I have ever encountered.

Bovell apparently amalgamated two separate scripts to make Speaking In Tongues - which is sort of obvious when you think about it, but has to be one of the happiest theatrical accidents ever. The thing that makes Speaking In Tongues so special is the way it's layered, the stories interwoven, intertwined, tangled. I'm struggling to think of a piece that's more cleverly structured, and the only one that comes close is When The Rain Stops Falling. Surprise, surprise, it's also by Andrew Bovell.

In the first act, we meet two couples - Leon and Sonja (Christopher Stollery and Lucy Bell) and Pete and Jane (Andy Rodoreda and Caroline Craig). All four go out drinking. Leon meets Jane. Pete meets Sonja. One couple cheats. One couple backs away. And from this one evening, the stone dropped in the limpid pool, the ripples spread wider and wider and wider.

Griffin Theatre's production of this play is simply outstanding. This script is brilliant but it's also VERY difficult for the actors, and I could not fault any of them. Not even a little bit, not even at all. Caroline Craig as Sarah in the second act was especially good, but seriously, if I was going to pick a flaw? I'd have to sit here for a really long time.

This play contains what has to be one of the most annoying theatrical devices ever - two people speaking at the same time, saying exactly the same thing. Hell, even Oscar Wilde didn't quite pull that one of - the bit in The Importance of Being Earnest where Cecily and Gwendolen simultaneously tell Jack and Algernon that their Christian names are an insuperable barrier and then Algernon and Jack simultaneously reply that they're going to be christened that afternoon doesn't really work even though it's meant to be a joke, and although I've seen a lot (like, a LOT) of productions of Earnest, I've never seen actors quite pull that moment off. If Oscar can't do, I would generally maintain that no one can...

*

...but they get it JUST RIGHT in Speaking In Tongues, and there is a LOT more than two lines spoken at the same time.

Maybe the reason that this device works in this play is because of the way just about everything seems to parallel everything else. Leon and Jane's experience mirrors Sonja and Pete's. The lives of these two couples are so intertwined that it seems only sensible that they would be saying the same things. It might seem contrived that Sonja happens to run into Jane the next night in a bar, Jane sitting and looking for Sonja's husband - but when you consider later how tangled the storyline of the first act is with the story of the second act, where Valerie the psychologist treats Sarah who might be sleeping with John and who saw Neil whose shoes Pete has; how Jane saw Nick throwing shoes that belonged to Valerie, a crime which is investigated by Leon... everything is coincidence in this world, because everything is connected.

*

Because of this, there is an intense claustrophobia in Speaking In Tongues, making Griffin's tiny diamond stage the perfect place to stage it. Every character is trapped - trapped in their own skins, in their own lives - but the minute someone does something to change it (like sleeping with someone they're not married to) the ramifications are instant. There is no personal change without changing everything. It's the dramatic articulation of the The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock - 'do I dare disturb the universe?'

*

It makes perfect sense to have the same actors playing multiple characters, because everything is connected and mirrored and paralleled (is that a word?) The only character who escapes is Valerie, and her solution is very... final. The door that opens that she runs through leads to a wilderness both lush and terrifying. It smacks a little of Picnic At Hanging Rock, the disappearance into the landscape, being consumed by it. This door - which obviously leads to death - is the only escape from the ripple effect of decisions within the universe of the play. (Sidebar: my sister and I have been wondering for ages whether there was a door at the back of the theatre there. We were convinced there wasn't. Seeing this play, we finally found out there was.)

*

I cannot speak highly enough of this production - the script, the acting, the direction, the set, the tech-y stuff... everything was 100% outstanding. It's hard to imagine a way this production could be better. I, for one, can't fathom it.

And if you haven't seen it, you're not going to be able to - it closes today and it's totally sold out. This tells us a few things: 1) I need to start writing reviews earlier; 2) I'm not the only one who thinks this show is excellent; and 3) you really, REALLY missed out.