All the attention on this Sydney Theatre Company production of Blackbird, has rested on the shoulders of the director, Cate Blanchett. 

The plot is confronting paedophilia, with a now adult woman confronting a man who had sex with her when she was 12.  They attempted to run away together, which is why he got a shorter prison sentence and since getting out he’s established a new life for himself.  She, not surprisingly, has been trapped in the past.

The problem for the festival is that there was a production of Blackbird at Circa theatre last year and in many ways it was better than this one.  We expect international shows to be the kind of thing we don’t see or can’t do ourselves so on that basis I have to question whether this is really a Festival quality show, despite being well (but not brilliantly) done.

Shed 6 is a problematic venue, and when you really need to feel trapped in this dirty small room with these two, you’re distanced from them. Being set in the round means the actors are constantly on the move, which becomes irritating.   

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First we must correct the NZ International Arts Festival publicity that suggests this is the first time New Zealand has seen David Harrower’s Blackbird. Six reviews on this site attest to last year’s powerful Circa production. That was in the intimate Circa Two, where we were virtually in the staff lunch room with Una and Ray, or at least ranked six-deep on its fourth wall.

This Sydney Theatre Company production plays completely in-the-round. It opened 15 December 2007 at their Wharf 1 venue (3-times the capacity of Circa two) and opened here at the Festival’s specially-created Shed 6 (450 seats) exactly a week after it closed in Sydney.

So, it was scheduled in this Festival sight-unseen, presumably on the strength of Cate Blanchet’s name, despite it being her first directing credit for a full-length. It’s an English play produced by an Australian company. And they use their own voices – no attempts at English accents – despite a key plot point involving driving to a port town intending to take a ferry to a place that requires them to have passports. (Tasmania, perhaps?)  

It doesn’t matter. The drama is in the encounter of Una (Paula Arundell) and Ray, now known as Peter in his new life (Peter Kowitz) in the garbage-strewn lunch room of his place of work, 15 years after they last saw each other. She has sought him out in the late afternoon, he has bundled her into the room to keep her out of sight (the text is explicit on this, although the staging suggests they have entered through opposite doors).

They are caged animals in this configuration. He is uptight and anxious, she is intrigued and wary. Inexorably some semblance of a truth emerges: when he was 40 and she was 12, they had a sexual affair. He was an emotional mess, she was an infatuated girl; he exploited her so that what began as a romantic fantasy of adulthood for her soon morphed into sexual reality, and because she was minded to do anything he said, she took this as being what love was.

No wonder she has had scores of ‘lovers’ since then and is unable to maintain a stable relationship. He meanwhile – after a sojourn in prison for what he did – has re-named himself and settled down with a solo mum and her daughter …

When I first reviewed this play I peppered my crit with spoiler warnings. But seeing this with the prior knowledge one brings to viewing any classic, ancient or modern, enhances the experience, because the play is about Una and Ray’s attempts to confront the messes they’ve made of their lives and the tragic impossibility of their ever finding resolution and redemption.

Paula Arundell’s Una is tough, assertive, objectively aware and intent on discovering what happened that night he left the port town bedsit to get cigarettes and never returned. As Ray, Peter Kowitz vacillates from strong to weak, nervous to mesmerised, keeping us – and himself, to some extent – guessing as to how real his rehabilitation has been; how truthfully he is living his life nowadays.

Both get to tell their stories of that night. New levels of insight and understanding are achieved … There’s calmness now, tenderness … And what happens next takes them both by surprise.  Crucially, their shocking resurgence of passion is mutual. Even more crucially, it is he who stops it. But who knows what might have happened if the step daughter (played with simple innocence by Danielle Catanzariti) hadn’t come looking for him, sent in by her Mum who is waiting in the car park.  

I won’t detail the final outcome here. Suffice to say this production reinforces my judgement that Una is emotionally damaged forever and Ray is cursed, like some character in Greek tragedy, to never be fully trusted again. Their crime against nature is irredeemable and this revisiting of it is, in part, a cautionary tale.

It is also a gripping 90 minutes of interaction and storytelling during which no-one – least of all us – can afford to be complacent. That Arundel and Kowitz make every moment vital, fresh and compelling attests to director Cate Blanchett’s directorial intelligence and skill.

Just one small detail I’d take issue with. At the end, their echoing chase through the corridors ends with them coming face-to-face again. While this is a valid representation of their never being able to escape each other, it does rob us of the powerful question that gripped me at the end of the Circa production: what the hell is happening out in the car park?

Blanchett’s choice to emphasise the play’s epic dimension by book-ending it with frozen moments that step outside the unities of time place and action is intellectually valid but rather subverts the audience’s emotional engagement, which may be her intention.

Set designer Ralph Myers’ food-container mess must be consistent with the playwright’s instructions and may stretch credulity a little at a naturalistic level while making its metaphorical point loud and clear. Speaking of which, Max Lynandvert’s loud mind-numbing sound-effects, which also bookend this production, over-egg the pudding entirely although the echo effects that aurally manifest the corridors beyond the room are well executed.

Judging by conversations I had afterwards with people who had seen the play before, and those confronting it for the first time, Blackbird is a play that stands a second viewing and this production is different enough from Circa’s to make it well worth while.

Afterthought: Previously I’d taken the ‘Blackbird’ title to suggest a sweet singer with dark intentions (Ray). Casting an Aboriginal as Una [correction 26/2: she looks Aboriginal but her ancestry is African and Irish according to this morning’s DomPost] adds an entirely new historical resonance and allows the idea of a bird in search of her lost song.  
 

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Blackbird is not about pedophilia as some of the publicity might lead you to believe. It is a psychological drama that probes with surgical skill and shattering emotional force into the lives of 56 year-old Ray and 27-year-old Una who was sexually abused by him when she was twelve. Or was she?

Ray served a prison sentence and then started a new life with a new name in another city in a middle management job of a factory somewhere in England. Una has tracked him down through a photograph in some trade paper she read by chance.

What does she want? Revenge? An explanation for his desertion of her in a room in a guest house by the sea? To show that she suffered more than he did from what happened to her before and after the trial?

Questions that intricately undermine easy assumptions, conventional attitudes and moral standards are raised throughout the play. One’s sympathy for the characters keeps shifting throughout the play’s tension-filled 90 minutes.

The major difference between Cate Blanchett’s Sydney Theatre Company’s production and Jane Waddell’s at Circa 2 last year is that it is played in the round so that it feels as if the audience, on steeply raked seating, is observing caged animals far below in a zoo as Una and Ray pace nervously about the litter-strewn lunchroom of the factory.

In the original English production and at Circa the lunchroom was backed by frosted windows behind which people occasionally passed. This heightened the tension that the pair might be discovered but it also suggested that, like the passers-by, we would always be unaware of the entire truth about Una and Ray.

The production starts and ends with a thunderous metallic noise that gives the play an unnecessary melodramatic flourish. However, Cate Blanchett’s fluid, beautifully paced production is graced with two blistering performances from Paula Arundell and Peter Kowitz who need no stagy embellishments.

Arundell’s volatile Una, all pain, defiance and vulnerability is perfectly matched by Kowitz’s nervous, pleading, emotionally distraught Ray. Her accusation ‘You left me in love’ is as shocking a moment as his ‘You knew more about love than I did’ and both actors make the emotions behind them raw and disturbing. Superb.
 

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