Broken

Three microphones stand symmetrically on the stage, backed by sliding doors of frosted glass. In a straight line from stage-left to stage-right are a few basic props, a hairbrush, puzzle-pieces scattered, a rug. Ash (Rarriwuy Hick) enters slowly amid the audience still talking. They hush quickly, unprompted by the house lights' usual dim. Hick starts speaking, the stage and house lights dim; the audience enters a world supported by a voice: unique, soft. This play is something else.

Broken is a Mary Anne Butler's multi-award-winning 2014 play. As the first play ever to receive the Victorian Prize for Literature (2016), there is a clear indication that it deals with a poeticism somewhat absent from contemporary theatre. Its word is its strength. Suitably, then, director Shannon Murphy has seen it appropriate to elevate the word to the place of dramatic action. And so we return to the set: three mics standing symmetrically.

Three actors interweave stories of temporal and spatial dislocation. Sarah Enright, playing Mia, and Ivan Donato, playing Ham, accompany Hick in a magical journey of collision. A car flips on the side of a road in the Northern Territory and a woman, Ash, is trapped inside, hanging upside down. Much of the story works on this very motif, the characters' lives being flipped upside down, them finding each other through accidents, and the stars always looking down at them, the only constant that they each try to position themselves around.  

Broken is simple, short, and spellbinding. This is a must-see new Australian work. Its script sings and this imagining sees that song soar.