No one else sees the world quite like Paul Rothwell, recently named winner of the Bruce Mason Playwriting Award.  It’s a great strength.

In the scenario for this play, for example, a family has mourned the presumed murder of a daughter for more than a year.  The mother is struggling to hold the family, and herself, together.  The father has found his niche, organizing a support group for parents of murdered children.  The girl’s younger sister has come out from her shadow to the point of falling for the boyfriend who’s still grieving.  The grandmother who lives with the family, well she’s plain nuts.

So there is your cast of characters.  Just after the mother (Rachel More) walks out on the family at the end of her tether, the dead Trisha (Sophie Hambleton) walks back in.  Not dead, but kidnapped and imprisoned.

You would think everyone would be thrilled.  Some are, some aren’t. And this is what the play explores, along with poor Trisha’s efforts to readjust to her old life after her own trauma.

It’s a great premise.  But it’s an uncomfortable mix of comedy and tragedy, probably intentionally but at times it’s frustrating more than entertaining or thought provoking.

It is also way too long, falling into the finale of the Lord of the Rings trilogy with false endings falling over each other. There’s a lot of repetition in the arguments which needs to come out.  And an unevenness in the performances – More and Hambleton are quite subtle and understated and consequently moving.  Kate McGill as the sister Chelsea and Irene Wood as the grandmother are in overdrive from start to finish.  It feels clumsy.

Half an hour trimmed off and it would be tasty pre-Xmas theatre fare.

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Apart from The Sound of Music are there any plays depicting a happy family?  From the Ancient Greeks right up to the 2008 Bruce Mason Playwriting Award  winner Paul Rothwell, whose latest darkish comedy, Christmas Indoors, opened on Thursday at Bats, I can’t think of one.

Unlike another New Zealand Christmas play, Robert Lord’s Joyful and Triumphant, which depicted a troubled family gathering for the ritual celebration over many years, Rothwell’s play confines itself to one Christmas and to what should have been, you would have thought, a joyous one. But as he has one of his characters say ‘Families are better in theory than practice.’

The play begins with Gwynn, dressed as Santa, lighting candles in front of a large portrait of his dead daughter, Trisha, who was murdered 15 months before. We learn he has set up a foundation for grieving parents who have suffered similar tragedies. His mother, Carrie, is a dotty old lady who thinks she sees Trisha on her favourite TV show (Mitre 10 Dream Home), his younger daughter, Chelsea, is besotted with Simon, Trisha’s boyfriend, and his wife, Lorna, who has had it up to here with all of them and walks out just as the festive season begins.

Then Trisha returns from the dead and the rest of the play shows, despite the conventional, conveniently arranged, and ironic "happy" ending, how they rather wished she had remained dead. After being holed up in "the ranges" by her kidnapper, Trisha has returned a different person and she wants to escape the entangled web of restrictions and expectations placed on her by her family and society.

While the play never quite soars there are some marvelous scenes – a hilarious video of Trisha’s funeral, Grandma’s flights of delusion, and Chelsea’s smouldering resentment of her older sister – and the plotting is assured, keeping one guessing and intrigued throughout. Paul McLaughlin’s production is fast-paced, unfussy and he has elicited strong, emblematic and energetic performances from his entire cast.

As the two sisters Kate McGill and Sophie Hambleton spearhead the cast with two well contrasted performances. As Chelsea Kate McGill lets us read Chelsea’s desperate emotions through her eyes and her strong physical actions that stay nicely on the side of comedy rather than straying into farce.  As Trisha Sophie Hambleton has the difficult task of keeping the role in a comedy rather than sliding into  a drama: she succeeds admirably.

As Gwynn Alistair Browning is funny as the weak and blustering father determined to do the correct thing at all times, while Rachel More’s Lorna is clearly the mother of the "new" Trisha, and Hadleigh Walker’s Simon is just the sort of young Kiwi bloke the "old" Trisha would have married. Irene Wood, in a bright red dress, with tinsel in her hair and waving a wand like a demented Christmas tree fairy, makes us laugh and sad, which is what both families and Christmas can do to us.

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If you want festive fluff, by all means rock around the Bitchmas Tree; If you like something murkier and more meaningful beneath the tinsel then you may prefer to spend Christmas Indoors.

This is a ghastly tale of a ‘Christmas Miracle’ that only Paul Rothwell could possibly envision.  The Doreen family is disintegrating 18 months on from the abduction of the eldest daughter Trisha (Sophie Hambleton).  Gran (Irene Wood) is rapidly losing her mind to dementia, sister Chelsea (Kate McGill) has set her sights on winning the heart of Trisha’s forlorn fiancé Simon (Hadleigh Walker), and father Gwynn (Alistair Browning), bedecked in a festive santa suit, has become the leader of PoMSaD (Parents of Missing Sons and Daughters) and appears to almost be reveling in his bereavement.

It’s all too much for mother Lorna (Rachel More), who just feels sick at the whole sorry story, and she packs up her handbag and walks out.  But – a miracle! – just a few minutes later, her lost daughter returns from her ordeal in a ‘grotty basement’, her long blond hair now a brown moptop.  However, instead of healing the family and bringing them together, Trisha’s return seems to drive them further into dysfunction.

It’s no wonder Rothwell is becoming a feted playwright.  Line for line, his plays contain far more insight, audacity and crackle than most of his contemporaries – and Christmas Indoors is no less replete.  There’s so much meat on these bones, it’s a feast for the audience.  Rothwell’s voice is so firmly ensconced in the modern kiwi vernacular of gossip magazines and sensationally grim news media that he cannot help but resonate with his audiences as topical and relevant.  However, despite this strongly recognizable authorial voice he has a great ability to maintain consistently drawn characters, each with their own comic merits.  Any Paul Rothwell play is a breath of fresh air.

That said, there are moments when multiple themes within this particular play compete for centrality and the dramatic impact lessens as a result.  The central conceit – that Trisha’s family, while pretending to be overjoyed to see her, actually wish she was still dead is strong, but is weakened by having to compete with other challenges and provocations.  This is particularly evident in the ending where a satisfactory closing point occurs, then another, then several more, each signing off on a slightly different note.  The play could benefit from a leaner, more focused intention.

It’s interesting to see Rothwell’s work directed by other than David Lawrence.  The two have been become linked over several years worth of productions, and it’s probably good that Rothwell is exploring some some alternative interpretations and approaches to his writing.  Paul McLaughlin, in his director’s note, correctly identifies this play as "a challenge to the director, actors and a challenge to the audience."

One of the greatest challenges to the director and actors in Rothwell’s plays is a certain stylistic quality – a sort of caricatured realism.  This style raises the question of whether to pitch the delivery naturalistically, in order to access the deepest emotional tones of the content, or whether to play it for laughs.  In previous productions Lawrence has risen to this challenge very successfully, and has worked sympathetically with Rothwell’s text and his idiosyncratic tendency toward bald, expository passages.

From an audience perspective, either a naturalistic or ham-fisted style could be pulled off successfully if consistently applied, but here McLaughlin appears to have hedged his bets.  Interestingly, the approaches seem to split between the genders in the cast, with Browning and Walker hamming it up to the hilt and More and Hambleton opting for a subtler, more modulated approach.  McGill and Wood perform in more of a grey area, as even played naturally their characters are ‘larger than life’ – but both actresses reach moments of gravity that lend their roles depth and truth.

The women have it, I feel.  The strongest moments of the play are between Hambleton’s Trisha and variously her sister, mother and gran, and in these exchanges we feel some of the potential bite that this drama carries.  Browning and Walker, however, never seem to come down to earth.  They strike the right poses and deftly work some big laughs from the crowd but crucially they never quite convince, which somewhat undermines the lovely work being done by the remaining cast.

It’s a shame, coming as it does hot on the heels of Rothwell’s Bruce Mason award, that this production so obviously suffers from a lack of production values.  One must appreciate the dedication and commitment of the unpaid, under-rehearsed cast to get this show out there in front of an audience but unfortunately that doesn’t mitigate the rough, patchy quality of the end result.

The Spartan set (no designer listed in the programme), crummy costumes and crudely designed and operated lighting (Nathan McKendry) only emphasise the no-budget feel, and instead of lifting the cast’s performances they tend to weigh them down with their staginess.

One can only hope that given Rothwell’s increased public exposure and reputation, he will not join the legion of talented playwrights suffocated by a lack of production support.  As it is the antithesis of Joyful and Triumphant, it would be thrilling to see Christmas Indoors given the full Circa treatment.  For now we will have to settle for seeing this work produced to a pretty rough and ready quality even by BATS standards; nonetheless, it clearly contains much of Rothwell’s trademark incisive humour and uncensored commentary.  There is much to be celebrated.

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