Babyteeth by Rita Kalnejais. Directed by Eamon Flack for Belvoir at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, February 11 – March 8, 2012
Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 25
It scares the life out of me to see a play that can so emotionally shake me, written by such a young person. Then I look back in history and realise that William Shakespeare was about the same age as Rita Kalnejais when his first plays began to be noticed. Babyteeth is her second.
I remembered that Shakespeare died when he was 20 years younger than I am now and ten years older than I was when I made my only serious attempt to write a play (which got no further than a professional reading). But, looking back again, I did try to persuade Broken Hill Repertory to put on the legendary beginning of kitchen sink drama: John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956). They thought it was too radical and risqué for 1964 (Alison wears her petticoat while she does the ironing), so I directed Arthur Miller’s All My Sons instead.
Why all this reminiscing? Because Babyteeth is literally a kitchen sink play, and because it is so good to see a new play with all the strengths of the best of its tradition.
In fact I reckon Rita has done better than William did in plays like Two Gentlemen of Verona. There’s more guts here (I’ll explain later) as well as a similar wild sense of humour. Babyteeth is, in a modern way, even more succinct than The Taming of the Shrew concerning falling in love and maintaining a marriage, and deals with these matters with more depth than Look Back in Anger. Kalnejais’ parents (Anna played by Helen Buday, and Henry played by Greg Stone) show more complexity in response to the death of their daughter (Milla, played by Sara West) than Miller’s parents do to the death of their son. And where Shakespeare could have written about the Black Death but never did, she dares to write about the inevitability of death – a teenager dying of cancer.
That’s where guts and vomiting come into the picture. It took all of the 40 minutes in first gear crawling from Belvoir Street along Cleveland Street and South Dowling Street before my palpitations slowed as the traffic at last sped up.
The structure of the play is a twist on a fairly common device. The end is played at the beginning, which morphs into the past and leads to the end we thought we had already seen. Except that only then do we learn what really happened. Then there is a coda – a quite lengthy positive musical note, which is a surprise at first but completes the narrative and eases us out of the harsh reality of sex and death. Yet, as I found out while driving home, even this resolution cannot assuage the hidden feelings.
To the production: it’s clear from the author’s and director’s notes that the play on stage is a cooperative creation of writer, director, actors and designers – just as good plays have always been. Not only is the play good, but all the work of these practitioners is top quality. Kathryn Beck – you’ll remember her eyes and a fascinating going-in-all-directions quality on tv in East of Everything – makes pregnant Toby and her dog the lively comic foil exactly as needed for the tragedy besetting Milla, her unlikely boyfriend Moses (archly played by Eamon Farren), her psychologist father and distraught mother, whose relationship with Milla’s violin teacher (Gidon, played extravagantly by Russel Dykstra) and his small boy student (Thuong – David Carreon or Sean Chu according to the day) is unexpected, quite remarkable, and finally crucial to her coming to grips with death.
To top it all, I drove home towards brilliant dramatic blood-red sunset clouds against a fragile teal blue sky, a wonderful reminder of the cloud Milla sees, of her tragic death, and of a beautiful play.
When you buy the program you have the traditional Currency Press publication of this new Australian playscript. It’s this total collaboration of author, production team, actors and publisher that makes the best of Belvoir about as good as you can get in theatre today.
