There’s nothing more ubiquitous on Australian stages and screens than teen angst. The latest addition to the cycle is debutant playwright Julia-Rose Lewis’ Samson, downstairs at Belvoir after premiering at Brisbane’s La Boite.
The play revolves around three friends mourning the death of a mate. The cast is a suitably politic cross-section of multicultural Australia: a black girl, an Asian boy, a white girl and an Aboriginal boy. Ashleigh Cummings, best known for TV’s Puberty Blues, stars as Essie, the deceased’s best friend and still carrying his secret; a secret that she can’t tell anybody – especially Beth (Belinda Jombwe), the dead boy’s girlfriend. Essie can’t bring herself to visit the makeshift shrine that’s been cobbled together at the site of the accident (or was it?) whereas Beth and Sid (Charles Wu) make the pilgrimage regularly. Sid is holding a candle for Beth, and both unite against Rabbit (Benjamin Creek), a younger Aboriginal boy they see as an interloper, as well as a bad influence on Essie, with whom he becomes increasingly close.
Belvoir downstairs is a much smaller space than La Boite, and you can tell the blocking was worked out in a less restrictive space. But the effect is certainly immediate. The foursome lunges about the stage within a hair’s breadth of the audience. The stage’s dimensions magnify the somewhat awkward balancing act director Kristine Landon-Smith must navigate: a social realist story set within the dimensions of an abstract theatrical space. Characters wrestle on the ground and in the next breath they’re running around designer Michael Hili’s graded stage pretending they can’t see each other.
Lewis has fashioned a sincere tribute to teenage pain and tentative connection, but Samson’s attitude towards race is oblique. The cast is ethnically various but the main character, from whose point of view the story is told, is white – like the playwright. The sidelining of Rabbit, an Aboriginal boy, feels pointed, even though the play is markedly devoid of any reference to race. Last year’s Sugarland at ATYP dealt with similar themes but race, and its attendant resentments, was front and centre. In Samson it’s ignored – and whether this is progress or willfully naïve is murky.
2.5/5 stars
Samson is playing at Belvoir St Theatre until Sunday May 31.
