When the apocalypse came (aka the Fall aka the event that shall not be named) and subsequent rolling lockdowns gripped Melburnians tight in their homes, all sorts of things started to fall apart. Social cohesion and community spirit? For every front-line service person performing Herculean efforts to hold hospitals and the like back from the brink, there were hordes of absolute drongos getting their biffo on over toilet roll in the supermarket. But in a ridiculous twist you could see coming a mile away, somehow house prices cruised on through pretty much undented. It was peak Melbourne that real estate was immune to the end of the world.
This is what makes A Simple Act of Kindness, Ross Mueller’s savagely satirical swipe at the city’s head-spinning property mania, so outrageously hilarious. Set during the encroachment of this attempted Armageddon, the edges of society are already fraying but will soon be torn apart. There’s something of Jane Austen’s laceration of the marriage contract in the emotionally blackmailed bargain that sparky comedian Lou Wall (Bleep Bloop), as young law school escapee Sophia, strikes with her furloughed travel agent father Tony (the always engaging Joe Petruzzi). Apparently unable to land a suitable suitor and obviously unable to score a mortgage without one in these helter-skelter days of housing unaffordability, she has hit on feigning engagement to her best friend, a clearly queer Greg (a gloriously skittish performance by Khisraw Jones-Shukoor). She hopes to hook her dad in with the promise of wedding bells and happily ever after.
In a bit of a Melbourne in-joke that’s totally unfair to those who live across the bay, the West is vaguely referred to as an undesirable, faraway place that Tony’s unsure Sophia should invest in. But the deal is struck over this “growth corridor” apartment with minimal windows nevertheless, with daughter press-ganging father into fronting up a dollar-for-dollar match on her deposit.
All of which is news to her extremely Toorak mother Julie, a magnificently unhinging performance by Sarah Sutherland as a would-be “maverick independent” running for state politics under the dubious campaign slogan “strap on for Stonnington”. As far as she’s concerned, her estranged husband has sunk more than enough of their money into hair-brained schemes and now it’s her time to shine, Sophia be damned.
And Sophia may very well be. You see, shortly after moving into her new digs – with Greg in the second bedroom, of course – the loud gurgling of presumed toilet flushings in other apartments becomes the least of their worries. A hellish crack quakes open in the polished concrete floors, with cancer the most likely cause. If only Tony had ordered that structural engineering report…
Fantastically realised by set and costume designers Jacob Battista and Sophie Woodward, this soon-to-be-concrete-coffin is a top-notch physical realisation of the familial collapse that plays out when money worries buried deep thrust all four into the unwelcome reality of sharing space (and too much ice cream) together.
Fast and furiously funny, Mueller’s zingers ricochet off the off-white walls at a rapid pace, expertly handled by director Peter Houghton, a dab hand at screwball comedy as perfected in his take on The Odd Couple at MTC with Shaun Micallef and Francis Greenslade. The vortex opened by this very real fissure, and by the unwanted close quarters of this unlikely quartet, sucks in everything from millennial ennui to boomer bat-shittery through the spiralling prism of property-driven delirium. If the “good bones” are rotting after you’ve sunk everything into them, what next?
All four performers give it their all in this endearingly chaotic sideswipe at a very modern dilemma, with Wall and Jones-Shukoor oodles of fun and Petruzzi pitch-perfect as an overgrown teen mainlining soccer video games and a Wayne Rooney obsession. But it’s Sutherland who triumphs, with the unruly unravelling of her perfectly coiffured salon do an excellent companion piece to that ever-widening concrete chasm. Devolving into a childish variant on the failed bohemian artist and woo-woo peddler, her fate is all too familiar to those observing lockdown through Instagram filters.
Workshopped through said challenge via Zoom, Mueller, Houghton and the cast and crew have pulled off a fabulously faulty ivory towers downfall in this must-buy mayhem of inflated real estate flattening satire.
A Simple Act of Kindness is playing at Red Stitch Theatre until December 18. For more information and to book your tickets, head to the website.
