Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera Huse April 7
7/10
When I was about eight, I became lost in a forest, and found it the most exhilarating feeling I’d known. I suspect British playwright Jez Butterworth sought to give his audiences a similar sense of disorientation with The River. Time bends, characters swap places, and we’re at least halfway through the play’s 80 minutes before we start to twig to what’s unfolding.
It does contain moments of exhilaration as it repeatedly presents facets of life as heightened experiences, with the characters electrified by the wonder of what they’ve seen, felt or remembered. This is communicated via a quirky mix of Beckettian concision and repetition, and an unforced poeticism, as when The Man (Ewen Leslie) describes a pool in the river as “gin-clear”, or when The Woman (Miranda Otto) recalls her father dying on the kitchen floor, his body “flip-flopping”.
If that sounds fish-like, you’d be right, because binding The Man, The Woman and The Other Woman (Andrea Demetriades) is that are in The Man’s rudimentary cabin by a river to go fly-fishing for sea trout. In the course of the play we learn much about the skill and excitement of fly-fishing, while also receiving a glittering discourse from The Man explaining the difference between brown trout and sea trout.
The Man lures both women to his cabin on the promise of trout, but with a side order of sex, of course. The play, meanwhile, examines the proximity of death to life, questions the nature of reality and love, thrives on miscommunication and downright lies, and becomes spooky without being in the least bit gothic.
Margaret Thanos’s production for Sydney Theatre Company is alive to the play’s intellectual complexities, with Anna Tregloan’s non-literal set and Damien Cooper’s lighting evoking moving nighttime water, while Sam Cheng’s music slithers in and out of focus. The three actors have a more challenging time of it, catching the fleeting glimpses of humour, warmth and truth that surface, then dive beneath the duplicity again.
Once we’re accustomed to the game that Butterworth’s playing, with the two women being substitutes for each other in a long history of such conquests by The Man, what’s missing – and I believe this to be the play’s problem rather than the production’s – is a reason for us to care. The Man is as expert with his seduction lines as he is with his fishing lines, and the women seem eager to believe.
While Leslie and Otto carve credible characters out of what Butterworth gives them, Demetriades is the one who more fully draws us in, partly because of her character’s greater playfulness, and partly due to the springy verbal and physical elasticity with which she realises it.
Perhaps Butterworth actually wanted us to remain detached, hence the lack of character names, but if he could have grabbed our hearts as he does our minds, The River would be so much deeper.
Until May 16.
https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/whats-on/2026/productions/the-river