Theatre Review: Outlaw

Outlaw by Michael Healy. Directed by James Adler. Eagle’s Neat Theatre. Northcote Town Hall until September 3.

There’s a really interesting play to be written about the complexities of ‘Green politics’, but this inert, one-dimensional drama by Mr Healy isn’t it. It doesn’t garner any favours, either, from Mr Adler’s almost perfunctory ‘walk-on during the blackout, stand and/or sit around, walk-off during the blackout' staging which appeared determined to disengage with the play’s all too fleeting and momentary moments of imagined intrigue and reduce it to a banal, self-interested and self-reverential soap opera.

In Germany (for some inexplicable reason), there is a tyre-slasher making a real nuisance of themselves within the local community, but the cast seem to treat the whole thing like the rest of us treat a pesky fly at a BBQ. As the play drags on, the head of the environmental activist organisation ‘Greenfriends’ (get it?) Tillman (Will Ward Ambler) is increasingly suspected of being the tyre-slasher. What doesn’t increase, sadly, is our interest in why it matters. What does increase, however, is our frustration with thinly-drawn characters standing and/or sitting around wrapped up in their own self-absorbed, dreary lives while Mr Healy takes to the media with the most unrelenting, tedious and ultimately pointless amount of ‘media bashing’ since the last Joanna Murray-Smith play I saw. The irony is that the indefatigable Phil Zachariah gave the best performance as ‘Ludo’, a journalist. David Loney as ‘Andreas’, Tillman’s “Right Hand Man” literally burst onto the stage with an abundance of energy, characterisation and audibility, which only made him seem more and more out of place – as though he was acting in an entirely different production of an entirely different play. If anyone else had made even the slightest effort to rise to meet him, we might have had a performance on our hands.

The bits of design by Meri Hietala were great, albeit very literal – especially her use of tyres as an ottoman and as parts of the over-used sofa. I especially liked her knife chandelier.

Ultimately, the real dramatic irony of this performance was that only a day later, Australia had its first ‘Green’ MP in our House of Representatives (even if it was with Labor and Liberal preferences) and an increased number of seats in the Australian Senate. Now that’s fascinating. But I’m only a self-serving journalist, so what would I know?

The review was commissioned by Stage Whispers magazine at www.stagewhispers.com.au