Brett Cousins as Graham and Kate Cole as Polly. Image by Jodie Hutchinson.
It’s not often one is moved to tears by theatre, or must hide out in the ladies to have an extra cry after the curtain comes down. But this happened to me when I saw Out of the Water, Red Stitch’s production (and the world premiere) of a play by US playwright, Brooke Berman.
A magnificent performance by the leads takes a commonplace narrative of married-boy-meets-girl to an affecting and honestly moving level; both Kate Cole as Polly and Brett Cousins as Graham bring individuality and nuance to fairly lightly-drawn characters. Polly is a single woman, disillusioned by love, who runs her own bar in the Big Apple. She goes to Illinois for the funeral of the man who was once her stepfather, out of a sense of propriety rather than affection, and runs into his son. They are sort of related but not really. Despite their differences they are both in need of intimacy.
Although the reason they jump on each other is delicately sketched, their motivations are not nor is what comes next. Director Nadia Tass brings powerful performances out of these two, the intense sexual passion between Cole’s Polly and Cousins’s Graham is stunningly believable. They’re hot. Emily Milledge makes us believe in the innocence and courage of her character, Cat, a Christian from the backwoods determined to fetch Dad home. Cat is sweet, funny and strong, it would have been easy to patronise this character but she’s handled with dignity and travels a long journey in a few scenes.
The best bits of Out of the Water are often where the cast say little while the subtext hoots and thrums. The script is deceptively simple, it doesn’t at first seem like the most inspired or original play ever written yet it appeals enormously, an unpretentious (despite the Homeric references the characters make – people do say these sorts of things), basically human and often funny tale of love and lust which grabbed me by the vitals and didn’t let go.
This production enjoys a perfect ménage of cast, script and actors. Out of the Water is a charmer, driven by emotion; in the few moments when it could almost veer towards sentimentality it pulls back right in time. Direction employs an economical cinematic touch at moments, giving us snapshots of characters, sometimes on their own and sometimes in silence, a device we’re more used to seeing in film than on stage.
Tass uses lighting as a prop, even more than that. Lighting design here is powerfully eloquent, almost a character in itself and is crucial to the telling of the story. (Lights are by Jason Bovaird.) The ending of the play is, perhaps, a little compressed but the story overall and its resolution will affect you. If you’re feeling jaded and wondering if you’ll ever be made to care by theatre ever again, go to this; I wasn’t the only one crying by the finale.
Rating: 3 ¾ stars out of 5
Out of the Water
Written by Brooke Berman
Directed by Nadia Tass
With Kate Cole, Brett Cousins & Emily Milledge
Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Chapel St, St Kilda East
5 February – 8 March
