A Claudia Karvan-led revival of Edward Albee’s taboo-prodding 2002 play, The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?, sees a happy, perfect family shattered by an unthinkable revelation.
Between the polished concrete floor, tasteful wooden beams, trending midcentury furniture and shelves of carefully arranged books, pot plants and ceramics, the Dunstan Playhouse stage could have been lifted straight out of Architectural Digest. It’s all so tasteful and curated – the aesthetics of affluence, with nothing out of place.
The living room’s owners, Martin and Stevie Gray, seem perfect too. Played by Claudia Karvan (Secret Life of Us, Bump, Love My Way) and Nathan Page (Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, The 39 Steps), the Grays are TV-star beautiful, happy and successful, with an opening rally of running jokes and easy affection establishing the private language of a loving, lived-in relationship.
But it’s all about to crumble. A feted architect on the cusp of his 50th birthday and some big professional milestones, Martin seems distracted, aloof and forgetful. As his longtime buddy Ross (Mark Saturno), a smoothly chauvinistic liberal TV host, arrives to interview him, it seems Martin is teetering on the precipice of a midlife crisis.
It’s a middle-aged cliche, so predictable that Stevie and Martin joke about the very idea of something as rote as Martin taking a mistress. But when Ross prods him into revealing the source of his distraction, something unexpected and dangerous spills out: for six months Martin has been in an extramarital relationship, with a farmyard goat he calls Sylvia. It’s more than sex for him – he loves her.
This central taboo of Albee’s Tony-winning 2002 tragicomedy explores how a marriage and a family can survive when confronted with a once-unthinkable transgression that “shatters the glass” of their lives. It was conceived to investigate the limitations of tolerance, and needle the righteousness of turn-of-the-millennium US audiences. The State Theatre Company of South Australia first mounted The Goat – excuse the pun – on this very stage in 2005.
Directed by the company’s artistic director, Mitchell Butel, this co-production with Sydney Theatre Company seems poised to tap into contemporary insecurities. For many, the prospect of being “cancelled” by censorious woke mobs, real or imagined, is the kind of existential, outsized threat that can keep them up at night, with breaches of an ever-changing set of rules amplified by the public shaming and long memory of the internet. Whether you buy into these kinds of culture wars or not, that sense of dread for yourself or your family is a relatable, very human fear.
In Sylvia, Martin, Stevie and their teenage son, Billy, are confronted with a scale model of that terrible, explosive situation; it’s not really about the goat, it’s about what the revelation portends. So, I wonder, after an hour or so of Martin desperately trying to explain his situation – as a furious and stupefied Stevie and Billy listen, rage and retch – why aren’t we taking this guy’s plight seriously?
Instead, this performance – on a Monday, in the middle of the season – spends most of its runtime set to farce. The absurdity of the premise is deliberate, the term “goat-fucker” repeatedly trotted out with relish, but as Martin shares his conflict and inability to reconcile his two truths, two lives, two loves, surely we should begin to feel for the guy? We should be moved to understand, on some level, why something as repugnant and foreign as shagging a goat might be worth risking such a solid marriage – let alone such a nice living room? But at moments of high tension, where the play should leave the house in pin-drop silence, the word “goat” still spurs guffaws from the audience.
Karvan’s power comes from her familiarity, relatability and mastery of the TV close-up capturing the emotional range of her instantly recognisable face. But in her much-hyped return to the stage, the nuance seen in a show like Bump – where her onscreen family navigates more than its share of taboos – is often lost in the big set and plate-smashing delivery.
One late-in-the-game twist seeks to pull the rug from under the audience; after comfortably laughing along at the absurdity of Martin’s conundrum, we’re confronted by a pair of more visceral and human taboos. It’s a bait-and-switch that should shock but in execution veers towards hammy. But one note in Albee’s script lands hard as Martin decries the hypocrisy of it all: that it’s not so much the acts themselves we fear but the judgment of others should word get out. Is our morality, in the end, only bound by what we think we can get away with?
By the end of the play that once-pristine set is a wreck, just like the family. Martin at least, seems convinced that his love for Sylvia is worth the chaos and destruction. If only we all could share his conviction.
The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia? runs at STCSA in Adelaide until 25 February. It opens at Sydney Theatre Company on 2 March
