Review: Buried Child

And so begins David Mealor’s director’s statement, showing us that Buried Child can be summed up with the same plot as 90% of plays set in rural Midwest and Southern America.

The ideal or criticism of the Great American Dream runs through much of that country’s literature.  Written in the late 1970s, Buried Child came off the back of a nation recovering from the Watergate scandal, deep in recession and high in inflation, a country unhappy with the war in Vietnam. In his script Shepard is extremely critical of the mythology a country burying its past, looking forward to a new day.

In a gothic farm-house in Illinois, rain pours down.  Matriarch Halie (Jacqy Phillips) yells down the stairway onto the largely un-listening ears of patriarch Dodge (Ron Haddrick), as he sits and coughs on the couch, watching the television and swigging from a hidden bottle of whisky.  Their son, the lumbering and slow Tilden (Nicholas Garsden) appears, in his arms an old sack, bushels of corn plucked from the depths of the yard.

Over years, the family has become destroyed, fortunes trapped in a rural farm-house, dreaming of what has been lost and hiding away from what can never be regained.  Their other remaining son, Bradley (Patrick Graham), is an abusive lout, and Halie pains for the now dead son who was her great hope.  Halie and Dodge have for many years lived in separate rooms; her dreaming of a happier life that was and escaping the house for a happier life in town; he alive perhaps only by a stubbornness to not leave the house to anyone in his family.

Review: Skip Miller’s Hit Songs

Skip Miller (Chris Pitman) stands in a gallery and looks at his photographs.  At the exhibition he is joined by brother Neville (Rory Walker), partner Alison (Lizzy Faukland), friend Augustus (Mondi Makhoba), and Patience (Assina Ntawumenya).  Patience came to Australia to find herself pasted on newspaper, bus shelters, billboards, and Skip’s agents have found her and brought her to the exhibition opening of the photographer who made her a house-hold face.   Skip Miller’s Hit Songs traces the lives of these characters on their lives, and their past which lead them to this moment.

Alison (Lizzy Falkland) and Skip (Chris Pitman) look at the photos in Skip's exhibition. Photo Chris Herzfeld

Skip, we are told, is an excellent photographer.  He goes in to the heart of war torn, drought ravaged African countries, and there he takes out his camera, and he documents.  Through the lens he brings a focused eye to a group of people who are suffering extraordinary amounts.  Through his photographs he captures unblinking eyes, and through them, we are told, you can see through to the pain and the hope, and you are captivated in the eyes of another.

We must be told these things, because the photographs shown to the audience in Skip Miller’s Hit Songs never justify this praise of a talent or dedication of a lifetime.  And if your production cannot justify the excellence of your titular character, how much of the production can really be justified at all?  In the final moment of the play, slightly confusing in its lack of explanation, Neville stands and explains just how brilliant his brother was: his talent, his hit songs, were the photographs he took.  Behind him, the wall fills with photographs of African people.  But there is nothing remarkable about these photographs; unless perhaps you were to remark on just how much they looked like the photographs we all have of ourselves, sitting in our wallets, of our identification.