It’s an often dismissed reality that those capable of the most savage acts are also capable of love and vulnerability. It’s a challenge for us to think that the same bloke who made us laugh at the pub, or who loved his kids, could also form part of a violent gang whose desperate aggression results in terror.
Yet for Australian playwright Patricia Cornelius this complicated relationship is something we can’t shy away from.
Savages is a play about four men: mates, heading off on the holiday cruise of a lifetime. Years of baggage will be abandoned on the dock. Once onboard, they’ll be a whole new crew of lads.
Troubles with the wife, custody battles, money woes, a life spent as the runt of the pack – none of it can go beyond the gangplank. But ambitions of luxury cabins, roaring nights on the floating palace and women in abundance quickly unravel.
Savages is an impressive piece of writing. The drawn-out vowels of Australian slang are met with jarring rhymes, interlacing a dark comedy into an ultimately horrific story. But it needs capable hands to ensure its grit. Without them, the dialogue could come off as a hackneyed depicition of an “underclass”. Director Tim Roseman does well to ensure his four-man cast Craze (Yure Covich), Runt (Thomas Campbell), Rabbit (Josef Ber) and George (Troy Harrison) don’t spill over into pantomime, and each performance blazes with conviction.
The stylised set is sparse and cleverly designed. It’s fully embraced by the cast under the direction of Movement Director Julia Cotton, where its simplicity and clever lighting allows the physicality of the four men to take centre stage.
There are genuine laughs in Savages, the goading and desperate acts of bravado coming off naturally. But there’s genuine fear too; the tide of feeling turns too easily with this pack and banter quickly turns to boasting before it collapses into full-blown rage.
The play is ​inspired by the Dianne Brimble case of 2002. This fact does place a kind of time stamp on it. It encapsulates a moment when we were just beginning to truly talk about Australia’s problem with an aggressive and implosive masculinity. While the conversation has grown and become more complex, it’s sad to see that we have not necessarily come much further in addressing it through action.
Playing right in one of Sydney’s lock-out-laws hotspots, it serves as an important part of our national dialogue about drinking culture versus systemic male violence, particularly as it is directed towards women. If Cornelius’ play isn’t already on the school curriculum, it should be.
At 75 minutes the play runs fast and finishes where it should. By the end you feel palably anxious and viscerally frightened — it’s a feeling I’m certain most women or non-heteronormative men can relate to. Composer and Sound Designer, Nate Edmondson, along with Lighting Designer, Sian James-Holland, should be commended for their contribution, both adding significantly to the crescendo of baneful behaviour.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Savages | Darlinghurst Theatre Company
Playwright: Patricia Cornelius
Director: Tim Roseman
Production Designer: Jeremy Allen
Lighting Designer: Sian James-Holland
Composer & Sound Designer: Nate Edmondson
Movement Director: Julia Cotton
Assistant Director: Erin Taylor
Stage Manager: Natalie Moir
Assistant Lighting Designer: Cameron Menzies
Set Construction: Simon D. Boyd
Cast: Josef Ber, Thomas Campbell, Yure Covich and Troy Harrison
Eternity Playhouse, Darlinghurst
1 April – 1 May
