Written by
Dale Stam
Directed by
Hannah Miller
Set and
Costume designed by Alexandra Howard
Presented by
Lexx Productions
Belconnen
Theatre 15 – 19th December, 2016
Reviewed by
Bill Stephens
One of the
hardest tasks for emerging playwrights is to get their work staged. The Street
Theatre with its Hive program has nurtured an audience for challenging original
work. Some playwrights, notably Bruce Hoogendoorn produce their own work, and
there are other avenues available.
But getting new work staged, and attracting
an audience to it, can still be a frustrating, and often, expensive business,
and certainly not for the faint-hearted.
Enter Lexx
Productions, which was created in 2010 by local actor, Alexandra Howard, to
focus on producing original works for both stage and film, while developing the
skills of local actors and technicians. Since then it has produced a number of
productions both in Canberra and Sydney. “Ripping” is its latest offering.
 |
| John Lombard, Stephanie Mathews, Annie Roberts, James Waldron |
Written by
Canberran, Dale Stam, “Ripping” is set in a café on a university campus. Several
female students on campus have disappeared, but these four friends, Stanley
(Cole Hilder), Ripley (James Waldron) Ed (John Lombard) and potty-mouthed
Bronte (Stephanie Matthews), are all members of a University Jack The Ripper
Theory Club. They seem rather more interested in acting out unlikely scenarios to
explain the unsolved Jack The Ripper murders than worrying about the current on-campus
disappearances.
On this
particular night, they are joined by a potential new member, Charlotte (Annie
Roberts), who’s really a journalist in disguise, and who suspects that one of
the members of the Jack The Ripper Theory Club may be associated with the
disappearance of the students.
For reasons
not altogether clear, Bronte takes a dislike to Charlotte and spends the
evening bating her. There is also a sixth character, a waitress (uncredited in
the program) who has no dialogue but whose disappearance heralds a significant
twist in the plot.
Though
potentially interesting, the play never really takes off, partly because of the
unimaginative direction, partly because of the inexperience of the actors, but
mostly because the author hasn’t really decided on the real focus of the play.
Much of the
expositionary dialogue takes place with four of the characters sitting around a
table. This is always a challenge for a director who must find interesting ways
of staging the dialogue so that it will engage the audience. In this case the
challenge was made even more difficult by the placement of a raised area at the
back of the stage where the various characters act out their Jack the Ripper
theories. Whenever this happened the other actors were required to look to this
area so that their reactions were lost to the audience.
Except for
John Lombard, all the cast delivered their lines in a naturalistic style more
suited to television than stage, and as a result, many possibly good lines
became unintelligible and opportunities to engage with the characters and their
pre-occupations were forfeited.
As well, the
theories offered for the Jack the Ripper murders were unconvincing, as was Bronte’s
aggressive alienation of Charlotte. Then finally, interrupting an already short
play for an interval completely dissipated what little tension had been building,
so that even when the inevitable murders do begin to happen in the second act, the
cast seem surprisingly unconcerned.
 |
| Stephanie Matthews, Cole Hilder, Annie Roberts |
However,
whatever its flaws, “Ripping “is Dale Stam’s first play. It has provided Hannah
Miller with her first directing assignment and the actors with an opportunity
to hone their craft. Hopefully, everyone
concerned will have learned and benefited from their involvement, so that
future audiences can look forward to the possibility of spotting an emerging
writer or theatre practitioner in future Lexx Production presentations.
