review: voices

Last night I saw another play!  It was a mystery play and I was desperately hoping for a comedy after Hamlet, but it turned out to be an artistic, social awareness piece about men with mental illness.  A real upper, hey?

That said, it was well done.  It portrayed five men with mental illness and shared their stories and daily lives.  It was clearly well-researched and written to be based on true stories, and the company was very much on hand to discuss issues and invite thoughtful responses from audience members.  The messages were all good, and I was proud to discover hours after seeing it that was actually a (quietly) Christian show, which I honestly hadn't picked up on.  I thought that actually said quite a lot, and was very sensitively handled.

Artistically, I thought the play dragged a bit -- had I directed, I would have probably chopped about 15 minutes off the roughly 70-minute-long piece.  It ended suddenly and we all turned and looked at each other, trying to figure out if it was intermission or actually over.  Turns out it was actually over.  The script had done a nice thing and come full circle, but that was the one part that could have been a bit longer, just so the audience would click and have the penny drop before the blackout (which took a plant to start the clapping as I think we all thought it was a scene change).

The acting was good and clearly quite demanding.  The set was appropriate for the show and realistically depicted a reasonably looked after, but certainly not spick and span, home for those with psychological illnesses.  It was a bit on the grungy side, with torn walls and aging paint and a continual presence of trash from recently opened biscuits.  Cigarette butts littered the place, and (again) there was quite the presence of herbal cigarettes (why herbal on stage?).  I missed the advertised partial nudity, though.

All in all it was a good production -- obviously significantly lower budget than Hamlet, but also significantly more likely to actually impact people's lives.

PS -- Voices was the only play I've ever been at that gave away a free coffee-table-type book at the end, not to mention a free program -- a definite anomaly in Australia!