Sue Smith’s new play, her second after Strange Attractor at Griffin in 2009, has been billed as a thriller, which is an unfair grab for the marketing types to have shackled it with.
Kryptonite flirts with espionage late in the piece, but at its heart it’s the story of a thwarted love affair, a modern Romeo And Juliet with cross-continental implications. Lian (Ursula Mills) and Dylan (Tim Walter) represent the Sino-Australian culture clash writ large, a single relationship clearly meant to illuminate a much bigger one.
Like countless young students from China living in Sydney, Lian is studying as well as working two or more casual jobs to survive. Dylan is a classic Sydney University type: entitled and articulate, fond of scaling a flagpole naked but with ideas formed at the coalface of no real hardship whatsoever. The play tracks the way their assumptions are challenged by each other, but Smith is after something bigger than a pat statement about cultural or political relativity. Tiananmen is the play’s organising event, and Smith uses it to try to explore the concept of memory itself.
Both actors are strong, especially Mills, whose character in lesser hands could have veered close to caricature. And if Walter as Dylan is never particularly likeable, that’s perhaps the point. Victoria Lamb’s set foregrounds them in front of walls made of corrugated tissue paper, onto which dates and names are painted but quickly disappear.
Lian becomes a successful businesswoman and Dylan a rising political star. They slip in and out of each other’s lives, and gradually the line where affection meets utility becomes blurry. Dylan and Lian are symbols, two characters also meant to embody two cultures, so it’s to Smith’s credit that they still feel like human beings. We’re left with a gimlet-eyed picture of a world in which good intentions exist, but real trust is all but impossible.
3/5 stars
Kryptonite is playing at Wharf 1, Sydney Theatre Company until Saturday October 18.
