Matilda (Kate Cheel) is falling dangerously fast for Gabe (Josh Quong Tart). Despite the two-decade age gap between them, there’s an undeniable spark and something about the novelist’s intellect has Matilda utterly dazzled. It’s an intellect that’s often – well, almost always – clouded by alcohol, but there’s something special about this man.
And she’s not the first woman who’s seen it. Gabe used to have a fiery relationship with literary agent Angela (Lucia Mastrantone), who’s spent longer trying to deal with Gabe’s alcoholism – she once believed she could love him sober – and has wised up to the difficult realities of being in his life. But Gabe is hoping his ex might want to publish his book, a fantastical novel about a man who dresses up and transforms into a cat. Angela isn’t impressed (is the whole cat thing just a poor homage to Kafka?) but Matilda still adores it.
Eventually Matilda gets a glimpse of what her future with Gabe might be like, and it’s not pretty. Gabe is going to have to sober up, but there are plenty of obstacles standing in his way.
From what isn’t the most exciting or original of premises – two perfectly sensible and decent but underwritten women fall for an emotionally abusive alcoholic man who’s dealing with childhood trauma – playwright Mary Rachel Brown delves into the nature of addiction and offers up some insights. Again, they aren’t the most original of insights (nothing you won't get from Bradley Cooper's turn in A Star is Born), but there’s dramatic heft in the way that Gabe relates to the women in his life and past traumas. It’s a shame that it takes until the play’s last few scenes before Brown really starts digging beneath the surface – looking seriously at how love and addiction interrelate and can overlap – but it’s worth it once she does.
Director Mitchell Butel has found the rhythms in Brown’s naturalistic writing and found an appropriate sense of whimsy in her more fantastical moments. Josh Quong Tart is excellent as Gabe – he manages to make a character who does some really dreadful things quite sympathetic. Kate Cheel does her best to bring energy and depth to Matilda, although Brown seems over-eager to highlight her immaturity; I’m not sure somebody who’s very recently read War and Peace, Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina would forget Anna’s surname.
Lucia Mastrantone provides some of the play’s most poignant moments as Angela, a woman who’s built up plenty of walls to protect herself, and Johnny Nasser makes the most of his little stage time as Angela’s new partner Tony. (Although Tony is a character who we don’t even really need to see on stage.)
Designer Genevieve Blanchett’s set – a simple white space punctuated with Alexander Berlage’s lines of colourful lighting – is an attractive playing space, but her preppy-hipster costumes for Matilda border on caricature. It’s almost as though we’re not meant to like somebody who’s an emotional core of the piece.
You might also question the appropriateness of Brown’s decision to use a character dealing with a physical and intellectual disability to lend the final scene some additional emotional heft. It’s not necessarily offensive – and the carer relationship points to a different side of the play’s core subject – but it feels like a lazy way to finish a piece that throws up so many thorny dilemmas.