This year, I am learning to be less. It might sound counterintuitive, but I promise this is a positive thing. Instead of being responsible for everything and everyone around me, on my own, because “no one else can do it”, it helps to remember that I am made up of all the people I have ever met. With the outrageous amount of plays, books, essays, etcetera, penned by him, Louis Nowra seems like he could be one of the bigger personalities in the world. But after watching his theatrical alter-ego “Lewis”, of The Lewis Trilogy, it seems even he aspires to be less – to be part of a whole, rather than one big thing on his own.
A fittingly extravagant goodbye to the SBW Stables Theatre – home of Griffin Theatre Company, in its current form – The Lewis Trilogy is a loaded triple-bill (five hours of theatre in total!) that spotlights the work of a legendary Australian playwright and his beloved adopted home city of Sydney. This nostalgic and immense production is as much a love letter to the writing of Louis Nowra as it is to the spirit of Kings Cross, to Aussie theatre, and to community, wherever we may find it.
...the magic of The Lewis Trilogy is that there’s a way to find yourself somewhere in the expanse of it all.
The Trilogy is a collaboration between Griffin’s Artistic Director Declan Greene and Louis Nowra himself, associate directed by Daley Rangi (Takatāpui). It brings together Nowra’s two hit 1992 works Summer of the Aliens and Così, and his 2017 return to writing for the stage, This Much is True. The first follows Lewis as a young teenager chasing UFOs on the housing commission, and the second shows us a post-university Lewis directing Così fan tutte at a psychiatric hospital. The third brings us to Woolloomooloo, drinking wine with a drag queen, a meth cooker, a jack-of-all-trades, and other misfits who regularly visit a place like “the Rising Sun Hotel” (aka the Old Fitz, that grand pub with a theatre underneath it, just around the corner from the Stables). The plays could be about Lewis, or Louis, but they aren’t – the true stars are found in the community of vibrant weirdos that surrounds him in each tale, as he moves further and further into the background, observing.
The three plays have been revised, edited and woven together into a marathon event – which you can either tackle in one eight-hour session (including dinner and snack breaks) on the weekend, or broken up over multiple evenings midweek. Each play has been concentrated down to a tight 90 minutes, and all are performed by a company of eight immensely talented actors. William Zappa and Philip Lynch play Lewis wonderfully in his various forms, but the Trilogy is nothing if not an ensemble work. Thomas Campbell (the dark horse of many musicals at Hayes Theatre Co, including the multiple Sydney Theatre Award-winning Metropolis), the wonderful Paul Capsis (whom we were just recently admiring in absurdist romp The Chairs), Masego Pitso, Darius Williams, the inimitable Ursula Yovich and Nikki Viveca make up a cast filled with generations of giants of Australian theatre.
Capsis is perfect as the theatre-obsessed Roy in Così, and brings a positively infectious energy to the rest of the plays that brightens some of the darkest moments. Yovich shines as Cherry, who only wants to feed Lewis while he directs, and as his grumpy, shrivelled English grandmother in Summer of the Aliens. Viveca is similarly excellent as Lewis’s mother Norma (Summer of the Aliens) and as the timidly anxious Ruth (Così). The Trilogy is worth seeing for so many reasons, but perhaps one of the most exciting is the beautifully generous performances given by every member of the cast.
Jeremy Allen’s set design places all three stories on bare, brown wooden planks encased by decaying cement walls that are covered in years of many coloured coats of paint. The tiny stage is framed by large cinema-like signage that comes apart between each play. Kelsey Lee’s lighting design and Daniel Herten’s composition/sound design reach throughout time, with smatterings of jacaranda purple and sonorous pianos twinkling toward Lewis’s past and future. Melanie Liertz’s costume design also brings together the three seemingly disparate worlds, with subtle colour palettes and textures emphasising the connections already suggested by the same actors playing various roles around Lewis.
As part of this review, I really wanted to be able to tell you which play to see if you dodn’t have time to sit through all of them before April. I’d even tentatively picked Summer of the Aliens, because that was the play that wrenched my heart the hardest. (It also seems to capture the essence of the argument Lewis/Louis constantly returns to: How do we make something of ourselves? How do we live with the choices we’ve made?) But on further reflection, it seems criminally reductive to suggest that all three of these plays could be represented by just one. The intent of this production is to bring them together, to find a way through them all to sum up Lewis/Louis, to sum up Griffin, to sum up Australia, to sum up what it is to be human.
And more importantly than all of that, who am I to tell you which one will grab you the most? You could be between divorces, searching for UFOs, living in a room full of mentally ill people, aspiring to be bigger, aspiring to be smaller – and the magic of The Lewis Trilogy is that there’s a way to find yourself somewhere in the expanse of it all. And even if you don’t, or you hate every second of it, at the very least you’ll know you’ve been a part of making Australian theatre history. Because after all, what’s a theatre without its community? And what are we, without all the people who love us?
The Lewis Trilogy is playing at SBW Stables Theatre, Kings Cross, until April 21. Wed-Fri from 7pm, Sat and Sun from 1pm. Tickets range from $129-$219 for three-show packages, and $55-$89 for single tickets. Check out the Season Calendar for a detailed performance schedule and book here.
