Dirty and delirious Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie engage us in an emotionally charged opening, director Kip Williams maintains the intensity for the next 85 minutes with the conflicting appeal of watching a car crash; it is certainly confronting, but well-wrought enough to be so without feeling indulgent. Stressed and mad, the production asks a lot of the audience in the first scene as we are thrown – as unsure as the inhabitants of the stage, and with the seeds planted for a paranoia that soon grows to match their own - into this dirtied dystopia. An unseen and unnamed malevolent power – them, they – watches from above. Adrienn Lord has created an impressively bold, hopeless set. Concrete pylons and piles of dirt are the bricks and mortar of this filthied existence. It is an acute visual representation of their flattened and trapped existence, the forced glee and the shame of unhappiness, of negative emotion. Massacred and flawed toys lay, sorry-looking, in the soil. Maree Freeman's script is littered with beautifully bleak poetry; a series of childish rhymes - about animals and their characteristics – are drilled in and drawled out, a frayed attempt at keeping or achieving sanity in the dusty prison. As attempts to dehumanize Delta – the latest prisoner – in a plan hatched by Bravo unfold there are hints of Lord Of The Flies in this primitive and psychologically intense drama.
Running at the Old Fitzroy Hotel until Saturday 3 November.
