Venue: Chippen Street Theatre (Chippendale NSW), Jun 29 – Jul 7, 2018
Playwright: Andrew Bovell
Director: Jake Ludlow
Cast: Elsa Cherlin, Dale William Morgan, Simon Thomson, Josie Waller
Theatre review
A woman disappears in Andrew Bovell’s Speaking In Tongues, but it is the relationships surrounding the incident that are its focus. It is an unconventionally structured play about ordinary heterosexual people, and through Bovell’s contorting lens, our every day is made strange to reveal the inconspicuous nature of what takes place beneath the surface. Our dysfunctions as individuals and as couples, are brought to light, refreshing but bleak in their honesty.
A team of young actors play the middle age characters of Speaking In Tongues. A noticeable deficiency in maturity is thus inevitable, but there is certainly no shortage of conviction in what they deliver. Act Two commences with the cast performing a series of monologues, proving themselves particularly engaging when working autonomously. Director Jake Ludlow’s attempts at theatrical embellishment are well-intentioned, but his strengths reside more persuasively in the production’s plainer sequences. It is a raw presentation, with a healthy quotient of promise put on clear display.
There are things we pay little attention to, that quietly engineer the way we experience the world. The personalities in Speaking In Tongues are absorbed in all their immediate concerns, but it is us, watching from the sidelines who are able to decipher the deeper implications of their entanglements. There is a missing person in the play who works as a consolidating device, but in this not unappealing piece of drama about the bourgeois, we see that everyone is lost inside their own discontentment, and come to an understanding of the triviality inherent in so much of our own suffering.
Suzy Goes See 