Image: Maddy Jevic and Roy Barker in Proof photograph by Theresa Harrison.
David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Proof is about prime numbers. Thankfully, just like prime numbers, Artefact Theatre Company’s staging of Proof is whole, undivided and without a fraction of a doubt worth seeing.
Somewhere on a suburban back porch, Catherine (Maddy Jevic) sits alone and depressed. When her father Robert (Roy Barker), an acclaimed mathematician, appears with a bottle of champagne to celebrate her 25th birthday, she grudgingly takes a sip. They back and forth as doting parent and resistant child often do and he chides her for wasting time when she could be discovering the next huge mathematical truth. She in turn highlights his lost years spent in senility. Despite their bickering they agree on one thing: Catherine’s fear that she may have inherited her father’s genius as well as his madness is becoming increasingly valid.
When Hal (Mark Yeates), a former student, discovers a potential history-making proof among Catherine’s father’s old notebooks and Claire (Anne Burgess), Catherine’s distant sister, returns to the family home, we are left questioning Catherine’s authenticity as well as the decisions of the past.
David Auburn’s words are the nucleus of this production. Tried, tested and award winning, the play was a huge Broadway success. It was then adapted to film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Antony Hopkins. And so, with nothing to prove when it comes to the writing, it’s left to the players to deliver.
Jevic brings Catherine to moody and complicated life. She is her father’s daughter; stifled yet cherished her portrayal is delicately nuanced to the character’s inner struggles but at times comes across too scripted. At other times quite brilliant. Barker, in his best Jack Lemmon-esque delivery, is strong; stirring, he shows the terrifying unknown path of old age that is awaiting us all. Burgess, as Catherine’s controlling big sister Claire, displays her experience as an actor offering the best and worst of intentions and avoiding the clichéd uppity straight sibling. And Yeates as Hal, Robert’s former student and ardent admirer, almost steals the show outdoing Jesse Eisenberg at his own nerdy game.
All players deliver their lines in liquid American patois, whisking us away to their world of maths and family drama yet never leaving the quaint back porch of their suburban home in Chicago. And despite the humorous elements missing their targets, director Emily O’Brien-Brown crafts an intimate and realistic milieu that’s both heart warming and familiar.
Another tale of fractured genius a la Beautiful Mind and one may worry that an all too familiar story is on the cards. Instead composite themes of patriarchal privilege, the thin line between genius and madness and the duty to family and oneself leaves something to take away and dwell upon.
Artefact Theatre Company’s production delivers an intimate, confronting and surprising work of art. However you add it up, Proof is theatre to the power of ten and well worth coming up with the sums for a ticket.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Proof
Artefact Theatre Company
Director: Emily O’Brien-Brown
Cast: Maddy Jevic, Roy Barker, Anna Burgess and Mark Yeates
Alex Theatre, St Kilda
9 – 16 June 2016
