US playwright Will Eno is an acquired taste, one that Melbourne has had more than enough chances to acquire over the years: Thom Pain (based on nothing) opened at the Beckett in 2007, and Middletown and The Realistic Joneses at Red Stitch in 2015 and 2017 respectively. That company clearly have a thing for him, because they’re back with another Australian premiere of his, Wakey Wakey. Whether the exposure has made his work more palatable to local audiences is another question; I suspect that in the same way coriander tastes delicious or like soap depending on your genetic makeup, Eno’s work is either revelatory or pretentious in the extreme, depending on your literary proclivities.
Guy (Justin Hosking) is dying, which we figure out quite early from his preoccupations as much as his physical condition. When we first meet him, he’s on the floor, prostrate and sweating. His opening lines are, “Is it now? I thought I’d have more time.” The next time we see him is in a wheelchair, dressed in a suit jacket and pyjama bottoms. The suggestion is that one half of him is off to his own funeral and the other half content to nestle into convalescence.
This insistence on opposing expectations or ideologies squares with the playwright’s rhetoric; Guy is constantly making one statement that is immediately followed by its antithesis. And as an internalised debate in the mind of a dying man, this could be an interesting device. But Eno never finishes a sentence – half the time the character babbles into incoherence before a single fragment has been spoken – so no actual ideology is established, no thought process allowed to play out. The effect is often like listening to a non-English speaker who’s attended a single lesson on conjunctions and wants to create thoughts out of them alone.
The first half of the play sees Guy (the character has so little texture or personal detail we may as well think of him as “a guy”) exercising his talent for bland affirmations, as if he were standing in a bookstore’s self-help section and randomly reading sentences from the most anodyne bestsellers. The playwright is presumably making a point about society’s inadequate resources in dealing with death, but when the character starts to ask us to close our eyes and think of someone who mentored us, it feels like we’ve slipped from the theatre into the kibbutz. Eventually, Guy’s pain and mental atrophy break like revelations into this feel-good atmosphere, but like all of Eno’s work, it’s a slog to get there.
Director David Myles commits his actors to the playwright’s idiosyncratic style, and keeps a tight leash on pacing and tone. Hosking is one of the country’s most under-appreciated talents, an actor of startling depth and nuance, and he is remarkable here. He’s got form with Eno’s oeuvre, having transformed the most irritating character from The Realistic Joneses into one of its most compelling, and he wrests every morsel of pathos from Guy’s pitiable situation. Nicole Nabout brings a quiet dignity to the role of Lisa, a nurse who acts more like Charon than a trained medical professional, gently ferrying her charge across the river Styx.
James Lew’s set is suitably clinical, and Lucas Silva-Myles’ lighting design is constantly suggesting a brain slowly shutting off its functions. Marshall White’s AV design limits itself to a simple series of slides for the most part, but then opens out into some rather trippy visual effects once the actors have left the space. It brings to mind the daggy mind-expansion aesthetics of the ’70s, as if Jonathan Livingston Seagull might fly by at any moment.
It’s hard to know if any of this is meant to be ironic, but then it’s always hard to know if Eno is straight faced or pulling our leg. Wakey Wakey presents as a meditation on death and dying, the ultimate TED talk, but there is so little texture and virtually no context to Guy’s story, and the rhythms are so stilted and hesitant, that it’s difficult to see why we should care. Eno’s work has been mentioned in the same breath as Beckett and Pinter, but this is a kindness it doesn’t deserve. His writing lacks genuine specificity, his characters coming off as mere schematics, so he never quite manages to convince us of their universality.
