Death arrives in town early in Samson and, as if the suburb wasn’t already stifling enough, death hangs around. We see it from the point of view of those who remain – both here, and alive, in a trio of teens: Essie, Beth and Sid.
Everyone is either too perfect and thus primed for pitfall, or already fallen, the souvenirs collected en route to rock bottom displayed (as in the Christmas tree knick knackery of mementos that hang from Rabbit’s shirt in Michael Hill’s thoughtful costuming) or threatening to reveal themselves.
The transition from the larger La Boite Theatre stage, where the play premiered in April, has not been entirely smooth. While Hill’s set – a small landscape of lightly-coloured wood – suggests the sandstone outcrops of the Australian bush, the rigid routes characters traipse across condense the space and in the claustrophobia the way they interact and to-and-fro feels too apparently rehearsed to be real. The vastness that both dwarfs and isolates the town, and prompts in equal measure the restlessness and closedmindedness that forms a schism in friendships, is not quite there.
Samson has more than just cast names in common with UK television series Skins. Here too we find the difficulties confronted when coming of age is doused liberally in liquor pinched from parents, but where the TV show was unapologetic and raw in its portrayal of these rites of passage Samson feels a little undercooked.
