It’s the hoariest creative advice known to writing workshops the world over: write what you know. For actor and theatre-maker Ash Flanders of acclaimed theatre duo Sisters Grimm, this meant diving deeply into some of his most painful recent memories and moulding them into a comedy of manners. This is Living is the result, and if the final package isn’t entirely cohesive, it’s hard to argue the work doesn’t come from a place of truth.
Couple Hugh (Marcus McKenzie) and Will (Wil King) have organised a New Year’s Eve weekend getaway in Hepburn with three of their older, but hardly wiser, girlfriends. The women have known each other far longer still, which has given them more than enough time to build a sediment of resentments and irritation over a solid bedrock of secrets and lies.
There is Alex (Belinda McClory), a brittle TV presenter accustomed to throwing insults but not so happy receiving them; Jo (Maria Theodorakis), a university teacher who spends far too much of her downtime attending to the needs of her students; and Sharleen (Michelle Perera), a recently divorced mother who’s only there because her therapist encouraged her to attend.
What they all know, and the audience quickly discovers, is that Hugh is very ill with cancer. This may well be their final trip together.
Given that Flanders is drawing heavily on his own experiences living with a partner undergoing chemotherapy, and that the play “springs from my regular experience with a close group of friends … who frequently find excuses to get out of Melbourne”, it’s surprising that this play fails to feel entirely organic or credible. With its characters tearing strips off each other in the manner of Albee or O’Neill, it often skirts dangerously close to cliche, and the central couple seem strangely underwritten.
Hugh is monstrously petulant and dismissive of his partner from the outset, and McKenzie doesn’t have the charisma to mitigate this: for too long he just seems like a miserable shit. Flanders doesn’t seem able to articulate what makes the character loveable or even worth fighting for. The character of Will is more sympathetic, but dramatically he’s left spinning his wheels, constantly worrying at the edges of the action; King has a limited range in the role and spends the majority of the first act with their hands to their temples in performative frustration.
With the central couple something of a write-off, it’s left to the three women to generate the play’s laughs and dramatic pivots. Thankfully, Flanders is very strong on the flying witticism and barbed rejoinder, and the remainder of the cast rise to the challenge with relish. McClory’s portrait of narcissism and fragility is superb: stretched and precarious but still somehow generous and loving. There’s a single moment where her grief cracks the surface and it’s profoundly moving for its restraint and brevity. Theodorakis is fantastic as the group’s centre and steadying influence, and Perera is a hoot as a woman transgressing her own boundaries.
Director Matthew Lutton does a solid job with the overall mood, eking out the play’s naturalism with lots of overlapping dialogue, but also allowing for some well-judged slapstick. The playing space (designed by Matilda Woodroofe) is huge, although not all of it gets put to good use – a bedroom we can see into but the characters can’t seems criminally underutilised. Paul Jackson’s lighting is largely utilitarian, the snap changes niftily highlighting temporal shifts. And Woodroofe’s costumes are terrific; with an endearingly daggy pair of pyjamas or a smoking black evening dress, they cleverly illustrate character quirks and psychological states.
This is Living is something of a milestone for Flanders, an artist who has long been identified with the subversive fringe. It’s a distinctly mainstream, middle-class work, the sort of thing Joanna Murray Smith has been churning out for Melbourne Theatre Company for decades – and there’s something sad about seeing an outsider artist polished beyond recognition.
And while this play clearly comes from a place of genuine pain, its central couple feel like a pale imitation of Prior and Louis from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: another gay couple grappling with terminal illness with something less than dignity and grace. It is a salutary reminder that all writing advice is useless. Don’t write what you know; write what works.
This is Living is on at Malthouse theatre, Melbourne until 30 July
