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The last four reviews I have written have featured new venues. These started with the Library at Newtown, and its production of ‘Darkness’ – not too far away, near City Road on Broadway, Bakehouse Theatre Company has found a new home in a fit-out of an old bank building. The main space continues the split audience seating, and seems larger than the old Kings Cross Theatre. The wall previously dominated by the operating box is now blank – designers need to fill two rather large walls both at the side and some distance from the acting in the centre. The Theatre space has its own pleasing ambience, especially when viewed from the narrow foyer into busy Broadway. Theatre lighting and haze competes with city and traffic – although during the performance the street is virtually silent, a result of good design. The Bakehouse group are to be congratulated on their new home and the labor, planning and finances required to make this happen.
It happens that the play CHERRY SMOKE by American writer James McManus became the premiere show for the new space. There have been months of delay getting the Broadway space up, so one can assume this play might not have been first choice for a premiere. An Artistic Director welcomed the show as appropriate for the event – in particular as it is being performed by a young cast, who had featured before at KKT, and being about the lives of young people. These comments reinforce the aims of Bakehouse to focus on young and emerging artists. I have seen several strong past productions at KKT with mature very experienced artists, and do hope the new venue can continue to offer a program to suit artists and audiences of all ages and experience.
The characters in the play are Pennsylvania into Tennessee type poor teenagers, educationally deprived and socially marginalised. This makes them a hard task for Australian actors to play. The dedication, drive and achievement of the cast was admirable, but finally well fed, bright, older Australian youth are a hard match. Meg Hyeronimus brought a distinct, charming energy to the role of Cherry, but perhaps stopped short of the gaunt, needy, impeded, innocent persona Cherry was intended to be. Then again, does the dialogue fully resonate with that persona – if not, then Meg did a commendable job interpreting the script. Fraser Crane and Tom Dawson played the two men, Fish the boxing addict fixed by violence, and Duffy, his more moderate brother, with assurance, skill and conviction. However there is something extreme and American about someone like Fish, and his addictive values of competition and destiny, that could be somewhat out of range of this production. Either that, or the actors in this production provide an intensity and credibility to a script that is not fully developed.
Would it have been possible for accents at least to be done in Australian?
Direction (Charlie Vaux) was adroit and pushed the show along – as far as it went. Lighting (Jasmin Borovsky) and sound (Johnny Yang) also served the fast and loud actor based acting well. The set design (Soham Apte) struggled a bit to make best use of the two large blank side walls and available space in between. It will be interesting to watch how forthcoming sets tackle this performance space.
This show was as watchable as it was forgettable. The characters – their outlook on life, their relationship to violence, their style, their socio-economic problems – can seem distant or other to an audience in this country. The show has a good portion of poetic utterances – to express romance, aspirations, and values – that are admirably written but quite out of character for their speakers. I wondered if the show aspired to be a fable or myth that could allow identification by a wider audience, but concluded that the script simply spread its linguistic wide without quite achieving flight.
I can’t comment on how faithful the dialogue is to its characters’ dialects. One suspects that the show is overwritten – sensationalising the pitfalls and trajectories of its poor characters, especially the machismo of Fish, and the layered victimhood of Cherry. Having said that, the script has guts and boldness in its conception and structure – it is fast, loud, energetic, in the tradition of American naturalism. Its structure might be a little too fast, with potentially confusing flashbacks. In a Hemingway strategy it exploits the theatrical nature of boxing, something the direction brought out well in a penultimate scene of the knockout of Fish. Perhaps the set design could have made more of ropes, as well as an industrial wasteland.
Whatever empathy might have been felt for Fish, and any chance for redemption in the play generally, was knocked out of the theatrical ring in the strange last minutes.There was no warning or explanation for the last scene. Theatre should provide back story and development for such a hasty climax.
Any moral compass or dignity gets tainted in the sense of ideology by which the urban poor are doomed regardless of their best efforts. What kind of fable is that? A mock Sisyphus absurdism, the stone gets heavier as pushed until it turns and crushes. It would have been better to make the amoral presumptions clearer, instead of embedding them in a contrived linear narrative that was set up to fail both the characters and the audience.
Bakehouse have appointed a really good and brave new venue, and it is a pity, scheduling apart, that the first show did not seem to have the vision and general appeal to match.
Crisscross Theatre in association with Bakehouse Theatre’s production of James McManus’s
CHERRY SMOKE is playing KXT on Broadway, 181 Broadway, Ultimo on the corner of Mountain Street, until the 9th April, 2023.
Production photography by Abraham de Souza
https://www.kingsxtheatre.com/cherry-smoke
