Joseph and Mahina by Thomas Sainsbury
Directed by Hera Dunleavy
Reviewed for Theatreview
Basement Theatre, Auckland
Friday 25 February, 2011
5.30pm
Shoosh!
OMG!
Thomas Sainsbury has written another play!
While not exactly a reason to raise the roof (he’s very prolific), it is reason to celebrate because Joseph and Mahina is a very good play. More than that, it is craftily (and economically) directed by debutante director Hera Dunleavy and the performances (Sainsbury himself, and Renee Lyons) are at times sublime. Actors, writer and director ~ along with some seemingly seamless technicals ~ make it look incredibly easy (it isn’t) and the result is a frequently touching and reliably funny look at ourselves.
The text is wonderful but, like all good scripts, it is a minefield of potential disasters. The characters ~ Dunleavy tells us in her simple director’s note that there are eleven but who would bother to count ~ are lifted from the page with such love and good craftsmanship that they transcend all their cultural anchors and their innate theatricality and become the people next door who we love and love to hate but ultimately cannot live without. In short, this fine theatrical team makes us care about these quirky souls and what happens to them and ache, as they do, for their eventual redemption, which, like all fine playwrights, Sainsbury denies us leaving merely a sliver of hope, a skerrick of anticipation.
Sainsbury is a fine comic actor whose tragic vein is often closer to the surface than we might suspect. As Hillary, the gossipy neighbour, Sainsbury manages a John Key-like catwalk-and-handbag mince yet he, in a nanosecond, becomes the sleazebag supermarket supervisor urging Mahina to play with his pecker. Good though these characters are, Sainsbury’s finest work is reserved for Joseph, the badly flawed, sadly married Christian youth group co-ordinator who falls in love with young Mahina. No caricatures here, just plain heartfelt truth.
Renee Lyons seemingly has it all. She has exquisite comic timing, a great physicality and an immediacy of emotional connection which is, at times, breathtaking. Whether through the medium of Mahina, the straight-talking, working class, ‘quarter cast’ seventeen year old, the elderly, chain smoking reverend or the ticking biological clock that is Joseph’s young, middle class wife, Lyons collects every laugh and tears the heart out at the same time.
Throughout, Dunleavy’s directorial touch is subtle and oblique. She evades cliché and caricature, never intruding, and has a seemingly clear understanding that icons need hearts, that audiences have to want to go on the journey, and that her characters need to matter. Her directorial narrative is seemingly driven by a desire to create an emotional synergy between actor, text and audience through textual clarity, honesty and economy. It doesn’t get better than that.
One small (and carping) reservation …
The two scenes that bring the play to its emotional peak are written like blunt force trauma yet there are still depths for the actors to plumb if they are to deliver maximum impact and allow for the delicious end of the piece to have its full impact.
In his writer’s note Sainsbury says: ‘I also wanted to work with the idea that actions are just actions. Essentially there is no ‘good’. There is no ‘bad’. Things just happen. And small indiscretions, or major indiscretions, are nothing more than blips on the heart monitor of life. They happen, there is a ripple effect, and then it all smoothes out again.’ He achieves this, and that he does so at a time in our nation’s history when Christchurch is in ruins and we are all grieving for our fellow citizens, should give us hope and a courage to face a future filled with uncertainty and anguish.
Joseph and Mahina is a shortish play coming in at slightly under an hour but all that needs to be said is said and all that needs to be done is done. As Mahina observes … ‘time waits for no man, or meat products … ‘.
Thomas, Renee and Hera … coolio!
dykiegirl 