Review: Poor Boy

It was the end of the first punishing day of this century-busting Melbourne heatwave, and Ms TN dragged out the gladrags and made her way into the city, leaving a little puddle of sweat behind her on the train. Boy, is it hard to maintain opening night elegance in this weather (and I won't even mention the Lindt chocolate that was lurking, forgotten but not gone, in my handbag...I just didn't know chocolate could get that liquid).

The destiny that lay before me, as inevitable as Luke Skywalker's brush with Dad, was the Melbourne Theatre Company's glamorous Sumner Theatre. We've been watching the MTC's new home grow for years now, and many have been the lively arguments about its eye-catching exterior (which I rather like, but others rather don't). And Wednesday night was its premiere outing.


I confess that the most attractive part, at least to begin with, was the blissfully cool air-conditioning, and the efficient and pleasant bar. Then there was the adventure of the toilets, which should be religiously visited by all patrons. Downstairs the men's toilets are blue and the women's are pink. So pink, so girly, so marbly and swirly that Ms TN nearly became delirious. I've never been much good at girly, and this was beyond the fairyfloss of giddy Barbara Cartland nightmares. The upstairs toilets, on the other hand, are a kind of gondola fantasia, with Venetian designs based on JC Williamson sets and mirrors that you have to be careful not to walk into.

After all this excitement, they finally let us into the theatre to see the main event. And let me be upfront: I looove this space. The scraps of quotes from famous plays that wrap the auditorium might be a bit kitsch, sure, but what a place to watch theatre! The seats are huge, big enough to sit cross-legged on if the fancy takes you, and covered with non-stick suede-ish upholstery (a fine idea on sweaty evenings). But what's most beautiful is the shape of the auditorium: the seats sweep upward steeply in one architectural gesture from the foot of the stage, giving the audience a singular unity, the democratic intimacy that is the first secret of good theatre.

And the stage. The stage has everything that opens and shuts. With Poor Boy, a "play with songs" by Matt Cameron and Tim Finn, director Simon Phillips was always going to use every inch of it. And this production certainly opens with some seductive theatrical conceits.

As the audience enters the auditorium, we encounter a poetically imagined Australian backyard – tufted grass, cumulus sky, a string of washing, a not-quite-solid house that is structured rather like the bridge of a ship. More than anything else, Iain Aitken's set summons nostalgia. As with Arthur Miller’s imagined stages, we know before a word is spoken that boundaries between the present and the past are troubled and unstable.

Front stage a child’s swing hangs down from the flies. Next to it is a red tricycle. The auditorium lights go down, the sound comes up – the amplified soughing of waves – and the tricycle begins to peddle around by itself in a circle, as if it is ridden by a ghost. Danny (Guy Pearce) pushes the washing line aside, as if it is a curtain, and launches into the play’s title song. He becomes an animating spirit, sweeping dust sheets aside that reveal different cast members and summoning the musicians, who rise out the floor with the music. By the song’s end, the play has been magicked into existence. This sequence shows director Simon Phillips at his best: he has a gift for graceful mise-en-scène, here tempered to Matt Cameron’s gently absurdist imagination.

Poor Boy itself, which features songs taken from various Tim Finn albums since the early 1980s, is a peculiar beast, and despite the odd moment of lyrical splendour or passionate performance, it doesn’t escape some fundamental conceptual problems.

The story, a kind of supernatural melodrama, concerns Jeremy Glass (played on different nights by three young actors), a seven-year-old boy who, after he is nearly hit by a car on a zebra crossing, suddenly claims that he belongs to another family. His parents Viv (Linda Cropper) and Sol (Greg Stone) are deeply worried, but then he walks across town and plants himself in the heart of another family, claiming to be their dead adult son Danny. He demonstrates such intimate knowledge of their secrets that the two families are forced to accept that the unbelievable is true.

This opens up a lot of deeply-buried conflict in both families, much of it driven by bitter sibling rivalries. Jem is the resented younger brother of the disaffected teen Sadie (Sara Gleeson), and Danny the older brother whom Miles (Matt Dyktynski) can never match. Ruth (Sarah Pierse), Danny's mother, is the stifling matriarch who infantalises her sons and cannot let them go, even in death; Viv, Jem's mother, is aging unhappily in her unhappy marriage, smouldering with resentment against her feckless husband.

Oddly, given the Chagall-like charm of the best of Matt Cameron's writing, the playwright irresistibly summoned throughout this text is Arthur Miller. The suburban family as a site of tragedy, the play's lyric realism, in particular the poetic ambitions of some of the monologues, all have the flavour of Miller. And there are specific allusions, such as the insubstantial walls of the family homes, which recalls the ghostly house in Death of a Salesman, or the tree that Ruth plants when her son dies, which echoes the memorial tree planted (and uprooted) in All My Sons.

But while he can certainly write a line, Cameron cannot match Miller's superb dramatic craft. The narrative of Poor Boy founders in its own complications, declining from the boldly impossible (which sparks the imagination) to the merely improbable (which becomes either tedious, embarrassing or laughable). Cameron's major problem has always been a tendency to tip from absurdity into whimsy, and here is no exception; only in Poor Boy the whimsy has become a little earnest. It gives a forced air to the emotional intensities that are so clearly aimed for, but which, as in Browning's Andrea Del Sarto, remain just beyond reach.

And then there is the problem of the songs, which are shoe-horned into the text even though they sometimes bear only the most tangential connection to the events on stage. They are mostly sung well and imaginatively arranged, although the band, riding its hydraulic stage up and down the haunted house, lacks a certain brio. It's hard to know why, dramatically speaking, the songs are there, except to provide a pleasant noise and emotional flavour. They all seemed terribly nice ditties, but in fact compositions like I Hope I Never or In A Minor Key are better than nice. There is a nagging air of ABC-TV variety special about it all.

Using extant popular songs to punctuate a show is, of course, as old as The Beggar’s Opera. Poor Boy demonstrates that a pop song, however finely crafted, is not necessarily theatrical. As the familiar songs rolled out, the sometimes desperately illustrative staging began to remind me irresistibly of a music video, in the same way that the play itself was reminiscent of a tv soap. Neither of these things is, in itself, a bad thing; without the bracing invigoration of such cultural slang, theatre dies a slow and sticky death. And the show could have done, certainly, with some of a soap opera’s economy and dramatic drive. But all the rough bits of these popular influences had been smoothed out or sawn off, making the whole rather anodyne.

It's well served by its cast, which, as has been usual recently at the MTC, is top notch: but again they seldom manage to find glints of hard emotional reality in between the plot. The notable exception is Stone, who excavates some fine moments of comic relief. The double staging of Danny/Jem, with lines shifting between Guy Pearce and the young actor, is beautifully effective, and Pearce has a fine voice and a touching (if sometimes rather earnest) presence. And Sara Gleeson, who was marvellous as the daughter in the recent Moliere and here reprises the cliched bratty teen with a refreshing candour, is clearly a talent to keep on eye on.

In all, I would have liked to have liked it more, since there are so many likeable elements; but Poor Boy never gels into a whole breathing creature. It's a slight story that can’t sustain its two and a half hours, and it doesn’t avoid moments of cheese or sheer silliness. As a play, it doesn't make a lot of sense; as a work of music theatre, it is conceptually muddy. But as a piece of design, it's a triumph; and perhaps, given the nature of the evening, it isn't surprising that the real star of the show was the stage itself.

A shorter version of this review is published in today's Australian.

Picture: The cast of Poor Boy. Photo: Jeff Busby

Poor Boy by Matt Cameron and Tim Finn, directed by Simon Phillips, musical direction Ian McDonald. Set design by Iain Aitken, costumes by Adrienne Chisholm, lighting design by Nick Schlieper. With Linda Cropper, Matt Dyktynski, Sara Gleeson, Guy Pearce, Sarah Pierse, Greg Stone, Abi Tucker and Gulliver McGrath/Jack McKinnis-Pegg/Hunter Stanford. Band: Ian McDonald, Michael Barker, Stephen Hadley, Stephen Ely and Gerry Hale. Melbourne Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company, Sumner Theatre, MTC, until March 8. Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay, July 9 to August 1. Bookings: 1300 723 038.