Sydney Reviews

Fallout feels like a young adult novel for the stage. There is a lot that it has in common with dystopian YA novels published in the last couple of years - Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games and Veronica Roth's Divergent spring to mind, with their emphasis on young people in situations where they are forced to be violent to each other - but the one it really recalls comes from much earlier: William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Unlike these books, Fallout seems to be lacking a key ingredient: it is unclear what exactly is oppressing the characters, what is forcing them to fight each other and laugh about it, what it is that is trying to make them "better". I suspect that this has been left deliberately vague in an attempt to force the audience to identify with the trapped characters. However, I felt it ultimately robbed the audience of a key piece of the puzzle that needed to understand the story.

Fallout is the story of four characters trapped in a single space. Codenamed Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta, they all want to escape, but are not sure how. Bravo (Lizzie Schebesta) believes that the way out lies in learning to laugh at horrific things, in learning how not to feel, and Alpha (Gabriel Fancourt) and Charlie (Amanda McGregor) follow her lead. Delta (Michele Durman), however, the newest of the four, has a more proactive plan: not as far gone as the other three, she wants to fight their captors and earn her freedom that way. But no matter what they think, the four of them know that showing too much resistance is futile: when they resist, their captors swoop in and "search" them, leaving them with mysterious scars on their bodies where bits of themselves has been scraped out.

The key piece I felt was missing from Fallout was a motive. Why, exactly, were these four being held captive? They did not know, and perhaps I was supposed to share in their frustration, but ultimately, it left me feeling unsatisfied. Were the four of them being groomed? if so, for what - and if so, where did the characters that disappeared go? what was their purpose? Were the four of them being tortured? Was this a sick form of entertainment, like the battles in The Hunger Games? I really wanted to know what the watchers wanted to do with the four people in the cellar. Why were there always four? Why were those removed replaced? Where did those who were new come from? And were did those who were removed go? By the end of the show, I really wanted to have answers to at least some of these questions, and I found it perturbing that I did not.

This frustration, however, is also a sign of how deeply I found myself involved in the world of the show. Playwright Maree Freeman has created four very different but deeply compelling characters, and my dissatisfaction at the lack of answers shows how deeply I found myself drawn into their reality. This does not necessarily excuse the show from eliding the framework of the world in which the show operates, but it is a sign of how gripping the show is. I particularly enjoyed the performances of Lizzie Schebesta as Bravo and Amanda McGregor as Charlie. Both actresses delivered wonderful performances, bringing subtle depths to characters that could have faded into the background much more than they did.

Fallout is a show that could easily have been a YA novel, and in many ways, I feel like this might have been a better format for it: it would have enabled both the mystery and ambiguity of the world of the characters to be communicated, while providing the reader with a greater sense of the universe in which it is located. That said, Kip Williams has directed an extremely compelling show. It is an electric hour and fifteen minutes, and though I often found myself frustrated with the lack of information, it was because I was so deeply involved in the story. It is definitely a show worth seeing.


Tamarama Rock Surfers Theatre Company
FALLOUT
by Maree Freeman

Director Kip Williams

Venue: The Old Fitzroy Theatre | 129 Dowling Street, Woolloomooloo, NSW
Dates: 17 October - 3 November 2012 (8pm Tues-Sat, 5pm Sundays)
Tickets: $33 Full, $25 Concession, $21 Preview and Cheap Tuesdays
Bookings: http://www.rocksurfers.org | 1300 241 167