Above and featured image: Joshua Merton as photograher Christopher and Patrick Phillips as Nicky Crane. Images by Robert Catto.
The new play Foam by Harry McDonald has an overflowing basin of contradictions, misguided complexities of identity, anger and politics. Foam is defined as: ‘a mass of small bubbles formed on or in liquid, typically by agitation or fermentation.’
And so was the bubbling of predicament, pressure and pathos oozing slowing from this Australian premiere’s brooding lead character, in public toilets and elsewhere, supported expertly by cast and creatives at Qtopia’s Substation unnerving recent opening night.
Foam, Harry McDonald’s 2024 play, bubbles with terse text and brief but dense dialogue. It is a revealing biopic of notorious skinhead Nicky Crane, a neo-Nazi living a damaged, secret and doomed life as a skinhead gang member and a gay man in a hectic closet will confuse, anger, shock and sadden.
This new play-first performed in 2024 London, inspired by true characters and reinventing new truths for us is an unsettling biopic of a Neo-Nazi with an axe to grind and a secret that will bring him undone.
Above: Patrick Phillips as the 15 year old Nicky Crane, with Chad Traupmann as Mosley. Image: Robert Catto.
Now fascism-and especially the gangs of Neo Nazis worldwide are not easy to find empathy or sympathy with. Even in current times, the narrow-minded nationalism, murders, larrikin violence and attempts to penetrate the mainstream entertainment shock and appal us.
This biopic is delivered hypnotically with languid deliberateness by Patrick Phillips. Tightness of dialogue, with extremely accurate dialect coaching work succeeds in leading us by hesitant hands to walk with a fledgeling skinhead from shaving his head in a public toilet to the death beds of a London AIDS ward in the 1990s.
Phillip’s multi-hued performance of Nicky Crane’s lost, languid, sociopathic, sexually repressed and ambiguous, murderous punk rocker is chilling. The vulnerability of needing to connect with either a violent fascism or a doomed gay community are in dynamic hands here in Harry McDonald’s difficult but stunning to watch recreation of violence and being gay in a very different time.
The hard-working, dual-role supporting ensemble cast also shines in this production. Members are Chad Traupman (man in the toilet, Mosley and gay lover Craig at the conclusion), Joshua Merten (as hesitant, obsessed entertainment photographer Chris, and later amateur porn director Gabriel) and Timothy Springs as rival gay gang member Bird, as well as a busy AIDS ward nurse in the final vignette of this play’s fluid tapestry, so rich in flashback portraits and caricatures of a cruel time.
Above: Patrick Phillips as Nicky Crane in his club bouncer days, with Timothy Springs as Bird. Image: Robert Catto.
Crane’s skinhead coiffe was noticeably absent but the red laced boots and horrifying Neo-Nazi bravado were menacingly on point. These icons and attitude were unwavering and stubborn in Phillps’ interaction with other cast members. This main character with his pathologically brooding drawl is a complex portrait and this is a performance to remember-perhaps for truly unsettling reasons.
This is an elevated, controversial and new perspective of London, underground gay characters, and the bruised humanity behind a notorious group of inhuman extremists.
As such, it is perfect and perfectly curated Qtopia fare. The recent biopic has found a talented cast and creative team to champion it Down Under. It sings a challenging song in the spooky industrial space beneath street level that the Qtopia Substation and its invading, random noise from our current streets can provide.
The pace of some of Harry McDonald’s clever trajectory and scenes around bathrooms various here can be insidiously slow and menacing. As slow as the nature of extremism invading society. Slow was the second wave of the uncompromising Third Reich from nationalistic roots, as was the development of HIV within a community with courage and desires confused and slow is the nature of coming out in a time when many repressed personal truths.
Be quick to catch this uneasy but illuminating tale – caught in an interesting mirror so well for us. Foam plays at Qtopia’s Substation until August 23.
Creative Team:
Writer: Harry McDonald
Producer & Director: Gavin Roach
Associate Director & Intimacy Coordinator: Sonya Kerr
Sound Designer: Akesiu Poitaha
Lighting Designer: Megan Heferen
Dialect Coach: Alison Benstead
