Blood, sweat, semen and tears. Add saliva and mucus and PROBE pretty much delivers on all bodily fluid secretions.
The play begins with celebrity actor writer director, Griffin Thornby, merrily masturbating to online porn, climaxing as the klaxon ring of the hotel room intercom starts.
He had forgotten that the film studio was sending someone to test him for Covid. Enter Holly, bio hazard clad and ready to probe his proboscis and palate. Her hands are shaking. Is it because she is new at her job or in awe of the superstar she is taking swabs of.
Is she indeed a health professional or a stalker or something else entirely?
It’s a case of secretions and lies and prised out truths as PROBE probes the hot button issues of consent, fame, power, and entitled masculinity.
Becca Hurd’s play confronts and kick starts a pressing conversation about the escalation of cancel culture and its ambidextrous ability to debase and exult. It raises the idea of shadow relationships or para social relationships, the belief that we can have real emotional connections with the artists whose work we love and how that connection can be strained and stained by the errant actions of that artist.
It looks at the consequences of obsession when a belief in a relationship founded within the art is rocked by an event that exists outside of it.
Provocatively pulsing with paradox and fizzing with philosophical to and fro, PROBE is a probe into gender imbalance, an exploration into the grey areas of the film industry’s moral turpitude in product and policy.
Rachel Chant directs a dynamic duo of Ziggy Resnick as Holy and Ryan Panizza as Griffin.
Panizza has the looks of the Hollywood leading man and carries the narcissistic confidence of a beloved star along with that shadow of self doubt known as the impostor syndrome.
Resnick conveys a nerdy energy that is both edgy and comic, a dialled up performance that would not be out of place in a Woody Allen movie.
