Flight Path Theatre, August 6
6/10
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, indeed. People Inside Me is the first play I’ve seen set in a crematorium. Plays galore have people dying in them, with the satirically macabre Titus Andronicus serving up 14 of its characters, but few are so specifically about death itself, and the relationship between the living and the dead.
Lauren (Charlotte Salusinszky) takes a job in a crematorium, burning bodies, and sweeping up what’s left for the relatives. I had a girlfriend who worked at the morgue, and know that anything can become matter-of-fact on the surface, but many people – military, medicos, fire and rescue, police – are traumatised inside.
Hence, black humour. The title, you see, is a quip from Lauren’s co-worker, Heather (Kate Bookallil), about the grey snot she blows from her nose being the people she’s inhaled that day.
In Katie Pollock’s play, directed by Anthony Skuse, and here having its world premiere, Lauren’s not so cut out for coping with it. She’s taken the job partly because she’s chasing the fate of the mother who forgot she existed, and perhaps even the babies she’s aborted. She wants to force herself to stare death in its blank eyes in order to… she doesn’t know. The crematorium has scores of boxes of unclaimed ashes, and she decides to restore those to their families, only to confront the myriad reasons people have for not wanting them.
Pollock’s play has too few moments of her glorious gallows humour. Without them, when sentiment is to the fore, the play can be overwritten, and the actors can seem at sea. There’s a misty horizon between thought and speech in drama. Part of the playwright’s job is to discern what’s best left unsaid; what the other characters and audience should work out for themselves. Lauren tells us too much. She’s too confused to be so articulate, and the result is that Salusinszky’s vocal delivery is one-dimensional and declamatory, which is at odds with her exemplary physical acting.
The play’s also overwritten in the sense that characters continually and almost wilfully misunderstand each other to create laugh lines or extend conversation. These people aren’t that thick. Certainly two of actor Peter Eyers’ several characters are much too intelligent and engaging. He plays a cynical, abrasive co-worker called Pinner, who commands the ashes filing system, and Brian, a camp, witty, hyperactive control freak from administration, who delights in delivering school talks about the dead to scare the crap out of the kids.
The fourth actor, Reuben Solomon, primarily plays Josh, who gets Lauren pregnant, resulting in a parallel plot of whether Lauren wants the child, and whether they’re staying together.
In an enchanting touch, the unclaimed boxes jump from the shelves, chasing Lauren like the ashes of her own conscience. But oh for more lines like Pinner’s response to a buzzer going off: “Ah! That’ll be Mrs Jones finished.”
Until August 15.
https://www.flightpaththeatre.org/whats-on/people-inside-me
https://www.innerwest.nsw.gov.au/whats-on/people-inside-me-katie-pollock