The barbed-wire fence criss-crossing the Kings Cross Theatre playing space is impossible to ignore. Half of the audience must walk around it on the way to their seats: the concept of conflict, borders and stolen space is immediately front of mind.
That’s the whole point of The Serpent’s Teeth, the work by Australian writer Daniel Keene which won the prize for plays at the 2009 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Comprised of two short plays – Citizens and Soldiers – Serpent’s Teeth takes a look at war from two distinct perspectives. The first is the everyday effect of conflict on the lives of ordinary citizens; the second gathers together five families, waiting to receive the bodies of their deceased soldiers from Afghanistan; their sons, brothers and lovers.
Keene’s script yearns for our empathy; Keene’s script wants us to remember that everyone who suffers in a war is a human, beloved by someone, similar to us.
Structured as a series of loose vignettes in both plays – the shift from one to the next is marked by taking down the wire wall – and directed here by Kristine Landon-Smith, this work is designed for a large ensemble. KXT have 15 actors on stage from nine different cultural backgrounds. They speak their own languages onstage – they make this story one of any time and any place.
But that seems to be the ethos of Landon-Smith’s entire production, and sometimes to its detriment. We are so unmoored in place, time and character that the poetic, lyrical language often feels untethered to any sense of reality. The company of actors are, more often than not, performing sketches of character – their words meet air and fall flat, because we don’t know who they are.
This might not have been the best script for Landon-Smith’s vision, which was to mentor new actors onto the stage – there’s an unfairly shallow ring to much of the production, and it isn’t because the company doesn’t have some strong insight or natural talent. They’re required to do intensive acting work, and that’s a big ask for new performers.
For vignettes like these to make narrative shape, form and impact, they require a level of detail and specificity; this is what propels universality. It’s the details of pushing back furniture to dance that makes a Taylor Swift song feel lived-in and relatable; it’s the playful, curious, dazzled way Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio look at each other through a fishtank that taps into our own tentative feelings of first love and makes us feel it all over again. This production of the The Serpent’s Teeth doesn’t show us something we might hold onto – a recognisable gesture or tone or interaction, a non-affected turn of phrase. There isn’t much on the page for the company to work with, especially not an independent company with little resources and varying levels of stage experience.
This is a wildly ambitious production with lofty, strong, compassionate intentions. It’s just too committed to its own vagaries to land with much impact.