Written by Finegan
Kruckemeyer
A Blue Cow Theatre
Production
Toured by Tasmania
Performs
Q Theatre, Queanbeyan
until 13 August
Review by Len Power
12 August 2016
Playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer has, according to the
program, an impressive list of credits.
He has had 78 commissioned plays for young people and adults performed
on five continents and translated into six languages. His work has been performed in international
festivals, US and UK tours and at the Sydney Opera House. With that experience behind him, you’d expect
‘Simon’s Final Sound’ to be pretty good.
It isn’t.
The story of a man who has just been told he’s going deaf,
we follow Simon’s dream to find an island described in a bedtime story his aunt
used to tell him. Along the way he picks
up with three quirky Aussies who decide to share the dream with him.
Simon is a bit of a disaster – a chap in his forties who’s
never done anything of significance. His
companions include a married couple with problems – Ginny and Michael – and an
obnoxious friend of Michael’s, called Claude, who’s never grown up and talks
about sex all the time.
The thin story is padded out for two long hours with irrelevant
scenes, especially in the second act with the long Tai Chi scene, the long card-trick
scene and the very long getting-drunk-on-tequila scene. The sex-obsessed Claude seems to exist to be
the comic relief of the show but it’s all grubby school boy humour and pretty
tiresome. The quirky characters all talk
too much and the climax of the show doesn’t work because there is no
involvement with these people.
The director, Robert Jarman, keeps the play moving at a reasonable
pace but is hampered by a very small touring set that is lost on the Q’s vast
stage. The actors perform as well as
they are able to with unreal and unsympathetic characters.
Was this play trying to tell us something about the
Australian character or something more profound? It’s really not clear what the playwright was
trying to say. I lost interest in it
very quickly.
Len Power’s reviews
can also be heard on Artsound FM 92.7 ‘Artcetera’ program from 9am on
Saturdays.
