Above: Professional actor and screenwriter turns the focus on himself for this telling of truths at the Sydney Fringe Festival’ s Touring Hub- New Theatre.
Playing at the Sydney Fringe’s Touring Hub venue until Fri September 26 is a searching, seventy-minute one-man theatre piece. It follows an arc of survival, growing up, growing wise and a garden of both the weeds of untruth and blooms emerging from the realisation of reality.
This energetically ennunciated storyline from youth to the new-youth of adulthood sings to us at a deliberately overwhelming pace. It’s undulating sequence of stranded chant has the overarching architecture of a roller-coaster.
This is quite the ride, from the childhood of an overweight eleven year old with a mother who wasn’t coping up to now. Topic areas we and Tom surge through include truancy, body shaming, body dysmorphia, self-doubt, post-natal depression, parenthood, parents not coping, dependency on family, dependency on drugs and alcohol, reckless living, sex, love, wrecked home environment, the guilt of an innocent child and the guiltless bad behaviour of a grown-up lying about how well they are doing.
The narrative is well written and neatly delivered with enthusiasm and chameleon success. Take-homes from this actor-writer’s packaging of a life’s stresses include the harsh consequences of feeling too much in the centre of a busy family are the scenic illustration and shared characterisations, adroitly drawn on the minimally decorated stage.
We meet via Moran’s monologue with his past self, lying about school days, his fellow students, his dubiously together parents, doctors, ultrasound experts, a counsellor and even thugs in the street.
The pace is elastic from this experienced writer and actor, with the hectic rollercoaster carriage easing up at key points of severe upset and also development, before falling into the next dip or chapter of the boy’s story or perceived truths to hold on and endure.
The is a suitably effective use of lighting and traversal of the stage to end up stage left for often traumatic or tragic one-boy/man chorus events. Some of the darkest moments are delivered here in the dimension of hurt, habit and eventual healing.
Confronting yet familiar as a lot of this material’s mini-climaxes are, these trips away from a biography unfolding on stage right are artistic interludes. One striking lighting effect and outpouring of consequence sees us watching a silhouette only, backlit in spooky thin outline around the protagonist’s harangued head with facial expression blacked out, confusions pouring out at as from a pitch black, featureless visage.
A lot of this show drags us into the familiar, around the carousel of challenge, up the street of damage, into the church of regret and past the penance of persistence. Not for the light-hearted, it does turn the concept of vignette into a high-powered Fringe Festival romp of deep personal origins.
The speed of memory-share and traffic with dangerous, intersecting, traffic-light-free moments requires effort to process and cope with from the audience. But this draining engagement with truths in near-hyperventillated Irish Brogue is grand. This show concludes as a sobering reminder that seventy minutes is a fraction of the developmental front-bumper of a life we should all be analysing and reworking to make sense of the lies trying to relentlessly shape the destruction of our future should we allow it.
