The inaugural production of Meow Media, a new company on the Sydney Theatre scene, was Peter Straughan’s ‘Noir’. Straughan is a British playwright, with credits including ‘Bones’. ‘Three Bad Men’ and ‘A Rhyme for Orange’. His specialty is dark, twisted and witty storylines.
‘Noir’ is set in the 1940’s and written in the same style as films such as ‘Sunset Boulevard’, ‘Chinatown’ and ‘Double Indemnity’. Ray is an amateur private eye looking into a murderous conspiracy surrounding an adulterous affair. George is on the hunt for the man who is seducing his wife Ruth.
Meanwhile Alison, an adult chat-line operator tells her shrink about a dream where she was shot in the woods by her father, Howard, whom the Reverend Lang happens to suspect of stealing $20,000 from church accounts. But when Morris, Ruth’s seducer, turns up as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant, things take a sinister turn for the worse.
Cutting to the chase, I didn’t find ‘Noir’ to be my cup of tea. Dana-Lee Mierowsky’s production was high on energy, with the young cast giving there all, but I found the narrative hard to follow, and the play felt more like a collection of interesting scenes and quirky characters rather than holding together as a whole.
The tone of the production was that it was a spoof of the great genre and the formulaic way that many noir scripts are written. A good idea but I just don’t think it worked, and came across a bit smarmy.
The hard working cast included Christie Hayes, Roanna Dempsey, Costa Ronin, Wayne Tunks and Georgii Speakman. The set was designed by Wendy Morrison, lighting by Larry Kelly and music by Daniel Baker.