★★★★☆
Having navigated the bustling backstreets and neon-lit doorways of Kings Cross on a Saturday night to get to the Old Fitz, the seedy south-side-of-Chicago setting of Joshua Rollins’ A Girl With Sun In Her Eyes doesn’t seem so far away.
This gritty little missing-cop mystery plays out like all your favourite Netflix police procedurals, packing box sets’ worth of tension and twists into little over an hour. There are the classic tropes of said shows – a good cop/bad cop pairing, red herrings and a suspect who keeps you guessing – plus the familiar stark noir atmosphere of Scandinavian crime thrillers created by the minimal stage set-up, ominous soundtrack and strip lighting.
It’s 6am and an undercover female police officer (Kate Williams) posing as a prostitute has been missing for several hours. The last person known to have seen her is here in the interrogation room being grilled by her former colleague (Martin Crewes) and his partner (Kai Paynter).
Jeremy Waters has some serious acting chops as the unlucky everyman, who after a booze-fuelled bachelor party finds himself the prime suspect in the case. He’s just a good guy in a very bad situation. A hapless anti-hero who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or is there more to him than that?
Waters manages to draw both sympathy and suspicion from the audience, leaving them guessing until the end.
And what’s the involvement of the other suspect (Ezekiel Simat), who has a known connection to the missing cop? Will we ever find out if his hard-nosed lawyer (Gabrielle Rogers) gets her way?
The action unfolds through flashbacks and a series of interrogation room encounters, each fast-paced scene cutting to darkness with a humdinger of a cliffhanger. In these pauses while props are moved about, the pace slows somewhat, especially for an audience used to ‘autoplay next episode’. Nevertheless, we are almost always on the edge of our seats.
As the plot thickens, the shouted curses sometimes get a bit too frequent, and there’s some disbelief to suspend during the action scenes – it’s here live theatre can’t compete with the expensive production and camera work of studio serials.But no matter. There’s much more depth here and a magnetic leading man without compare.
A Girl With Sun In Her Eyes is an ugly tale about fate and missteps. What if we’d been a moment earlier? Taken a piss instead of having a cigarette? It’s a scummy backstreet Sliding Doors.
Take that fork in the road towards seeing it.
A Girl With Sun In Her Eyesis playing at the Old Fitz Theatre until Saturday November 14.
