Belvoir Downstairs Theatre, December 8
6/10
Playwright Lewis Treston wrote Hot Tub after dreaming of a helicopter lifting a hot tub on to the roof of a Surfers Paradise high-rise. The play, finally premiering after winning the 2016 Patrick White Playwright’s Award, unfolds more like a nightmare: not one of fear and loathing, but of zanies and grotesques worthy of Hieronymus Bosch.
The requisite straight character, Dido, has come to stay with her estranged father, Murray, during Schoolies, in a tower called The Great White. “Straight” is a relative term: her opening gambit is to hit on her dad for 32 grand so she can have a gastric sleeve operation in Brazil.
But she’s sweet, well-meaning and sane by comparison with Murray, a professional gambler, Jade, his new wife, a career mystic, Eunice, Jade’s mother, the shady owner of The Great White, and Reese, Jade’s son, a pill-pusher and gay pornography creator. Then there’s Officer Cheryl, a lunatic cop, Stinger, a lunatic bikie lord and Macka, a Shakespeare-quoting electrician and undercover cop.
All have a slender grip on reality. Jade answers a repeated query from her husband with, “Sorry, babe. I forgot I was here.” They’re fun characters to play, and director Riley Spadaro has cast them consummately. Melissa Kahraman excels as the semi-ingenue Dido, who learns more about life in a week than she did in the preceding 17 years. Kahraman gives her a veneer of teen boredom when confronted with the trappings of crime, while also letting us glimpse the vulnerability beneath, so when Treston punctures the mayhem with a moment of poignancy, she makes it telling.
Kieran McGrath embodies Murray’s swindling, swaggering gaucheness (even without white shoes!), and Diane Smith ensures Eunice is a matriarch with whom no one messes. Shannon Ryan is hilarious as Jade, the apotheosis of New Age loonies, as is Jack Calver as the wanton Reese. Ella Prince makes Officer Cheryl alarmingly manic, and Patrick Jhanur plays both Macka and, especially effectively, the unhinged Stinger.
The best episodes are so funny that there should be a health warning before you go in. But Treston’s work labours under its own inanities too often, even with this exceptional cast. Perhaps it should simply be shorter, because the style of humour becomes exhausting, as does the frequent shouting. If you need an end of year giggle, however, you’re guaranteed.
Until December 21.