Sydney Reviews

It started with a kid.

Surly, lip curling, gangsta rap parlaying teen, Daryl, insolence personified, is on the brink of expulsion from his secondary school. Tom, a trainee teacher, is tasked with the travail of trying to salvage this troubled teenage boy. The tensions, taunts, threats and end of tethers multiply into a battle of wills, wits and wiles, exhausting and exalting – and that’s only the first scene.  

Duncan Macmillan’s compelling and provocative play, Monster, confronts the emptiness of empathy and whether indifference and insensitivity can be remedied. Is there any hope to reach a child who appears afraid of nothing and cares for no one? A modern citizen for whom society does not exist.

Is this teenager – a terror rather than a tearaway – a product of personal trauma, or a manifest of indifferent parenting and the non stop drenching of anti social social media and mindless violent videos. Born bad or manufactured monstrous?  

Tom’s summation of Daryl is telling – “He's got zero empathy. You could be having a conversation and start choking to death and he'd probably just sit there and finish eating whatever you were choking on.” Later he suggests putting all those like Daryl in a locked room and let them sort it out between themselves. Monster refuses to deliver easy answers. Like all good drama, it provokes and confronts and compels conversation.

Campbell Parsons as Daryl dazzles with a performance charged with the danger and menace of a main circuit cable that’s been severed, unsheathed and unfettered and snaking crazily with unbridled, shocking energy. Tony J. Black as Tom, presents the cool, calm and collected vacuum sealed vocational man heated into fury and frustration, flummoxed by the chink in his armour of civility and his subsequent failing sympathy for a sociopath.

Romney Hamilton is pitch perfect as as Tom’s wife, Jodi, pregnant with their first child, a natural anxiety exacerbated by the stress of her husband’s “project” and the insidious idea that she could be incubating a monster. Linda Nicholls-Gidley as Daryl’s flinty grandmother, Rita, unconditionally loving of him, quick to blame the system for not stemming his wayward ways.

Director Kim Hardwick keeps the action and suspense sharp, a hundred minute high wire, high tension act. 

With Monster, production company Tiny Dog presents a giant mastiff of a show, complete with ferocious bark and a lacerating bite.