Saw ZigZag Street last night. I was kind of interested to see how a Nick Earls’ novel (I’ve only read one, back at Xmas time) would pan out into theatre; I would have thought film would be the more appropriate medium. It was also something of a relief to see some light-hearted, easygoing theatre in Alice as much that comes here is theatre with a capital ‘T’ (i.e. Shakespeare) or opera with a capital ‘O’: nothing too light-hearted or experimental for the provinces. (Probably only larger, well-established companies can afford to travel.)
Mr Earls’ book panned out quite well into theatre, actually, with the cast of four athletically playing double and triple parts (except for the male lead, who’s on stage all the time). There were no dud performances; all these actors were quite capable (especially the lead woman) in switching personas.
ZigZag Street follows what seems to be the usual trajectory of Mr Earls' work (‘seems’, I say, on the slim pretext of having consume two of Mr Earls’ texts). The hero battles through the squallor and carnage of twenty-something life, including the filth of shared household or his own accommodation, misguided passes or bonks to find Miss Right, who seems to be a professional or an arty girl of some kind (but definitely not a nurse). Ok, so it’s genre fiction, and it’s amusing -- it amused me, for example.
I found Rick, the hero of ZigZag Street a lot more appealing than the ambitious young nurse-slaying registrar of Bachelor Kisses, probably because Rick is self-deprecatory and down on his luck (my suspicion is that the hero of BKisses is pretty close to Mr Earls himself, actually; not totally sure why, perhaps it's the level of childhood detail fed into the hero's characterisation). And we Australians like self-deprecation, tho I have to say that I did find myself thinking, what exactly is attractive about this guy other than that he has a job (which he’s barely just holding down), and yes, a sense of humour, and his grandmother’s house rent-free. (That’s how harsh we women can be.) Evidently his boss doesn‘t share these opinions tho, as they end up in bed together, which I thought was going to happen as soon as he mentioned he thought she was a babe…
One of the things that was preferable about the theatre version of an Earls’ book is that the murky spermy guy world of thoughts (which Mr Mulgrew does oh so well over at Everything is Wrong with Me) is pared back somewhat…Yeah, I know I’m a prude and this stuff is funny but I felt sometimes with BKisses there was maybe be ‘too much information’ from this internal world, and that it could have been leavened by a little more growing insight (as in Birmingham’s He Died with a Felafel) or by some humility and self-deprecation, as in ZZ Street.
The other thing I felt about this play was: drama about human relations is always going to have some appeal, because we’re all interested in that, n’est-ce pas, but this seems to be drawn from very much the weird twenty-something parallel universe (of which I’ve of course only ‘just’ escaped from) where the worst thing that could possibly happen in life is being dumped by someone. Whereas once you get into the jaded 30s, it’s more like: oh, yawn, another relationship break-up, I didn’t think that was ever going to work out anyway, glad he/she has seen the light, etc etc. So I found the central tragic motif of this play (that the main character’s struggling to get over a live-in relationship that ended 6 months ago & that he has to ‘move on’) maybe a bit yawnsome tho it is of course being played for laughs.
Also a little credulous at the conclusion of the play, where the main character finds love in the form of a depressed semi-employed artist. They bond over their mutual misfortunes (i.e.being unlucky in love) -- and their whacky senses of humour. But found myself sending thought-waves to female character: Eeeek, don’t tell him you’ve been depressed, dear, I’d leave that one till a few months’ into the relationship, when you knew you had him hooked (n.b. I’m banking on the guy being too imperceptive even to notice that she's a bit down). Always a mistake to admit to any ‘issues’, sadnesses, difficulties, etc, indeed anything of emotional content, much less to cry, too early on. Anything like that will make a man run a million miles.
So yeah, I didn’t find the climactic ‘bonding point’ of the play particularly credible; in real life, I thought the hero would probably have shot out the door at the first sight of tears or, at very best, acted in a gentlemanly way for the rest of the evening, but never returned. (Actor playing main character did not seem particularly comfortable comforting crying woman either.) Anyway, ZigZag Street was a-musing. Go and see it if you want to have a good laugh; it will appeal particularly if you like that Qld-style Andrew McGahan, John Birmingham school of abject spermy shared household ‘why are there stale sandwiches rather than babes at the bottom of my bed' sense of humour.
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