The Curtain review

There are few mercies in life, according to playwright Daniel Keene, and like our patience and our expectations, they thin as we age. One of the last mercies is to find the curtain of forgetfulness, the final void, falling in front of us before we have to fully experience the loneliness of death. It isn’t a cheery curtain (and Keene’s play of the same name can’t be called upbeat by any measure), but it does have its charms – and it can be very funny before the grim reality descends. It is even merciful in its own way.

Keene is a playwright who has made it his life’s work to champion the voices of the downtrodden, the misbegotten and the deeply marginalised. His work with director Ariette Taylor had a huge impact on this city decades ago, but it has also cast something of a shadow of unfulfilled expectation on his subsequent work. His output in recent years has tended to be well-meaning and dutiful, even faintly condescending. But The Curtain feels lived in, a compassionate but level-eyed look at three people who are surviving on the margins of the social contract.

It concerns Francis (Paul Weingott) and Leon (Gil Tucker), who are boarders in the house of Ada Munro (Milijana Čančar); hers is a neat and comfortable home in an unnamed country town, and their existence there is secure. Or at least it is until Ada, sick of grieving for her long-dead husband, decides she’s finally ready to pack up and sell. Suddenly, the men are faced with the precariousness of their living arrangements, which bleeds quickly into a realisation of the precariousness of their lives.

Keene is heavily indebted to Samuel Beckett, the constant bickering and banter between the two men recalling Waiting for Godot’s Gogo and Didi, and Endgame’s Hamm and Clov. And like those characters, there is a sense of these lives occurring in a vacuum, the accumulated details of an existence here worn away to a kind of eternal present. But while Keene appropriates the rhythms and syntax of Beckett, he doesn’t quite achieve the universality – the feeling that these men are metaphors for the human race, twirling their fingers around the thread of nothingness.

Ada is a different case, and Keene uses different techniques to demonstrate her personality. She is both forthright and gently mysterious, the details of her life just vivid enough to invite our interest but sketchy enough to open possibilities. There is something of the Chekhovian daughter about her, haunting her own life, her melancholia and her restlessness forming a kind of armour against despair.

Overall, it is an elegiac piece, a play of ageing and acquiescence in a minor key. It needs a very supple and confident production, but it doesn’t always get it here. Director Beng Oh has produced Keene’s work before, most recently on this stage with Wild Cherries, but this direction is altogether too timid and flat-footed. The performances are awkward and hesitant, and the arrested rhythms of the text come across as simply under-rehearsed. Every now and again the play jumps to life, but it doesn’t capitalise on these moments, and the pacing flails.

That timidity bleeds into the design – Andrew Bailey’s set and costumes are perfectly adequate, but along with Ben Keene’s underwhelming sound design, they don’t produce much heat. Lisa Mibus’s lighting is simple and occasionally hints at the symbolist nature of the writing. You could argue that these understated aspects of the production manage to speak to the play’s modest ambitions, and certainly the charm and poignancy of Keene’s observations still shines through.

But it isn’t quite enough. It feels as if Keene in this new stage of his writing is experimenting with different tonal registers, pushing past the boundaries of psychological realism into something both stranger and truer. But a deliberately underwritten work like this needs a sharper and more confident production. As it stands, it’s a little like watching a talented writer tapping on the window of his dramatic heroes from the outside. Thankfully, he has a long way to go before his curtain comes down.