At close to three hours, Annie Baker’s Pulitzer-winning play The Flick is not a minute too long. Far from being epic or flabby, it’s a concise, intricately observed and absolutely riveting microcosm of contemporary Western culture and age-old personal dramas.
All the action takes place in the auditorium of a small suburban one-screen cinema, where the employees of an inexorably failing theatre grind out their shifts with a mix of humour, heartache and intense, doomed passion. Suffused with sexual tension and passive-aggressive rivalry, the three employees form and ultimately break their loose pact against the outside world. And all the while, as if to rub it in, the perfect, unchanging worlds shimmer on the screen: the fantasies, the clichés, the memorable monologues.
In contrast, Sam, Rose and Avery live avowedly ordinary lives beset with the concerns of immediate proximity: love, money and the future of celluloid in a digital world. It’s a balancing trick Baker’s script executes with great aplomb and emotional honesty. The result is an incredibly moving and subtly insightful naturalism.
Red Stitch’s Australian premiere production of The Flick is one of the finest and most effective pieces of theatre you’re likely to see all year. It’s restrained, powerful and intimate, grimy, gripping and flat-out beautiful.
Red Stitch @ Shebeen to 17 Aug
