Image by Dylan Evans.
Louis Nowra’s play hails from 1971. A mental institution is the setting. This is the era of the Vietnam War, feminism, free love, alternative thinking about marriage and the emergence of more enlightened theories about mental illness. In its day, Cosi must have touched a nerve and highlighted topical issues. What is madness? Is it socially constructed? Is branding someone ‘mad’ a means of social control? Is a lunatic asylum an alternative prison?
As in the film, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Lowra exposes the flimsy borders between the ‘insane’ and the ‘normal’. He sides with the incarcerated and strikes out at hypocrisy and the stigma of mental illness with a razor sharp, satirical knife.
Initially, the laughs are at the expense of the ‘patients,’ but this incrementally shifts until the humour targets the ‘normal’ as much as the ‘maddies’ during the dramatic arc. Lewis (Benjamin Schostakowski) an inexperienced young theatre director, is hired to produce a play to ‘bring the patients out of themselves’. The story has universal appeal. Think of all those Hollywood movies about winning sports teams made up of extreme and hardened prisoners.
A mixed bag of institutionalized unlikelies volunteer to be actors and find themselves rehearsing Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte within the unsympathetic walls of the psychiatric hospital. Anthony Standish is mesmerizing as the lithium-sozzled, genital-cradling zombie, Zac, and also as the insufferably arrogant Nick, and as Justin, the haughty psychiatrist.
Director, David Berthold – the newly announced Director of the Brisbane Festival – uses Doug, well characterised by Aaron Davison, to blitz the divide between patients and the civilian visitors. James Stewart of Packed To The Rafters fame is heartbreaking as the repressed Henry who eventually explodes with delicious cyclonic fury. Trevor Stuart is grating and horribly goading as Roy, the know-it-all bi-polar opera buff, who mercilessly taunts Lewis with blistering one-liners.
Pacing is awkward at first, with the cast seeming to pause for laughter here and there that doesn’t eventuate. But a heartier rhythm takes over in the second half, fuelled by sound designer Samuel Boyd’s choice Mozartean snippets and Ben Hughes insightful lighting. And the dam bursts and laughter flows.
There are daring moments, directorial surprises. Amy Ingham is great fun as Cherry the motor-mouth bully with a monster crush on Lewis. Schostakowski’s straightforward stance as a foil for the larger-than-life characters works well up to a point, but his saintlike impassivity towards Roy’s heckling does not. There is further scope for chuckles and mayhem in the institution’s performance of Cosi and the segment in the dark falls a little flat. But overall, the production is exhilarating enough for the audience to leave all chatter and smiles.
Rating: 3 ½ out of 5 stars
Cosi
La Boite Theatre Company
By Louis Nowra
Directed by David Berthold
Cast includes Jessica Marais and James Stewart
Roundhouse Theatre, The Works, Kelvin Grove Village
www.laboite.com.au
8 February – 8 March
