Sydney Reviews

Media vita in morte sumus.

Rita Kalnejais’ Babyteeth is about coping with the chaos of life, the curve balls and kicks out of bounds, those outrageous slings and arrows, swings and roundabouts, cast before us over a lifetime and how dealing with them not always goes as planned, that no one strategy is necessarily the ready made solution.

Rachel Thomas plays Milla, a fifteen year old living with an aggressive terminal disease. She’s the only child of psychiatrist, Henry, portrayed by James Smithers and Anna, former classical pianist, played by Jane Angharad.

On the face of it, the family follows a so called normal structure in their middle class suburban street, each of them coping with the shadow of death that they try to relegate to the space where the elephant lives in the room. Mum’s on pills, anxious and wanting to cocoon her daughter in cotton wool. Dad’s shooting up, shouldering the idea of assisted dying.

Enter Moses, biblical of name but certainly not saintly. He may be an opportunist junkie, but he becomes Milla’s addiction. Potentially as destructive as the disease riddling her body, Moses is a lot more fun, an iconoclastic life force injecting Milla with a lust for life that spits in the face of the Grim Reaper, releasing a devil may care awakening. An unlikely saviour.

Sideshow attractions are provided by Esha Jessy’s pesky pregnant neighbour with maternal instincts towards Henry (she has a dog of the same name) and Philip D’Ambrosio’s tough love Latvian music teacher, who sees Milla as a lost cause but determined to rescue Anna.

For Milla, euthanasia is not wasted on the young and she is determined to die – just as soon as she’s had sex.

Directed by Kim Hardwick with lighting by Topaz Marlay-Cole and distinctive sound design by Michael Huxley, Babyteeth bites into a tough subject with plenty of food for thought to chew on.