In ‘The Immediate Theatre,’ Peter Brook describes and distinguishes the theatrical medium as being ‘like a magnifying glass, and also like a reducing lens.’ In its indivisibility from the present moment, theatre, he posits, has the unique capacity to both ‘narrow life down’ and widen our field of vision in doing so. Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre, in both its intimacy and emphasis on the interaction between storytelling and performance, seems to encapsulate Brook’s sentiment, consistently staging works that provoke as well as prompt, edify as well as entertain.
This is no less true of LUKE, Red Stitch’s newest offering from acclaimed Australian playwright Angus Cameron, developed through the company’s bespoke INK program. Receiving its world premiere under the astute direction of Iain Sinclair, this compelling three-hander, across its three distinct acts, becomes an increasingly slippery negotiation between memory, truth and the stories we construct from the past. What actually happened? Whose version of events are we being asked to believe? LUKE offers no easy answers; only questions that complicate and implicate in equal measure.
With only three performers, LUKE is an exercise in theatrical compression: its world revolves and contracts around the shifting relationship between Chris, his former teachers Damon and Olena, and the events that go on to reverberate throughout their lives. The story begins on a summer evening in 2007; Chris, a 19-year-old former student newly employed at his old school, spends the night drinking and debating with his former teachers Damon and Olena, engaging in increasingly charged conversation about sex, sexuality, and – in Damon’s case – the eroticism he perceives within the act of educating. Casting a shadow on the intellectual sparring, however, is the impending transfer of a student, Luke, following a complaint of harassment against a member of staff. The implications, amplified by Damon’s provocations surrounding the age of consent, prompt Chris to question whether his former teacher may himself be implicated in Luke’s departure.
What follows, as the play leaps decades into the future and Chris has both struggled with and benefited from the ordeal, is a destabilisation of ‘truth’ and an increasingly uneasy interrogation of the ethics of storytelling. ‘The moment you tell a story you tell a lie,’ says Damon in the first act, and this statement, a passing assertion from one writer to another, goes on to haunt the play as the boundaries between memory and invention become increasingly unstable. And here lies the brilliance of LUKE’s formal construction: the story isn’t simply ambiguous; its theatrical structure makes us repeatedly reconstruct it, unsettling what we think we know with each act and making us question everything that came before.
This instability is not confined to Cameron’s script; it’s embedded in Nathan Burmeister’s set, which transforms across acts, shifting the same set pieces to reveal new, unforeseen angles, giving memory material form. The warm, welcoming atmosphere of act one is rendered a stark, bare white in act two, the familiar space becoming estranged. When we come to act three, the door – previously functional – is left wide open, revealing the backstage ordinarily concealed. The set blends in with the stage itself, laying its artifice bare: the wires exposed, the mechanisms previously hidden from view made visible. The production thus progressively strips away the illusion of a stable world. The set, like memory, is continually restructured before our eyes, and under Sinclair’s direction, so too are the characters.
In a dialogue-heavy, character-focused work such as this, the success of a production rests upon the strength of its cast. Commendations are due for Dion Mills’ performance as Damon, the queer, provocative teacher whose charisma and easy assurance make his increasingly troubling provocations all the more disarming. Mills approaches the character with a pompousness that, while teetering on the edge, never quite tips into caricature, instead giving Damon an assured self-importance that renders his intellectual posturing and voracious monologuing strangely believable. Under the veneer of his erudition, however, is something more unsettling. Mills reveals in Damon, through his incessant proselytising, a need to control, be it conversation or otherwise. This sets up the central tension very well: it’s difficult to determine whether his controversial opinions surrounding sex and the age of consent are evidence of wrong-doing or simply the ramblings of a man who delights in transgression.
Olga Makeeva’s Olena is a striking counterpoint to Mills’ Damon. Where Damon fills the space with self-indulgent affectation and verbosity, Makeeva works through restraint, painting a picture of a woman who knows a lot but gives very little away. The strength of her performance – and strong it most certainly is – lies in her ability to hold multitudes at once: a pause, a look, a moment of hesitation can suggest discomfort, complicity, scepticism, or something else entirely. Olena is an enigma: we are constantly compelled to interpret her, but never quite able to decipher her. This makes her an excellent foil to Will Lonsdale’s Chris, the narrative constant whose perspective ours is filtered through. Yet where Makeeva gives Olena an elusive interiority, Will Lonsdale’s Chris feels comparatively static. As we experience the play’s shifting versions of events through him, there is a certain demand that Chris shifts too; a demand that isn’t quite met. Lonsdale is consistent, but in a story such as this, consistency is actually a deficit. The reveal at the end of act two begs for weight that his performance doesn’t quite provide, slightly dampening what could have been the most powerful moment in the show. Nonetheless, the material is strong enough to withstand the lapse.
Formally ambitious and psychologically complex, Cameron’s LUKE is an urgent, unflinching queer story whose striking entanglement of the personal, the political and the theatrical marks it as a compelling contribution to contemporary Australian theatre. At once intimate and expansive, bold and understated, LUKE is theatre that understands the importance of the medium, narrowing its world to three bodies while magnifying the questions that reverberate between them.
This is not passive theatre; this is theatre that demands its audience be present and engaged. And with work of this calibre, the audience should be.
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