Review: Gundog is brilliant and bleak
Written by Simon Longman, directed by Anthony Skuse, presented by Secret House
Review by Rebecca Cushway
Theatre about grief and loss has a weight to it that can at times be difficult to balance with entertaining and engaging storytelling. British playwright Simon Longman’s Gundog masterfully handles this balance and tells a story of rural survival that is both engaging and absolutely devastating.
Upon seating myself in the King’s Cross Theatre for Secret House’s production of Gundog, the primary emotion that settled in me was fear. Even before the performers took to the stage there was a thick tension in the dimly lit space, with nothing but the skeleton of a tack room and an amorphous sheep-like mass on the wooden floor. Death was in the air.
Without any fanfare or introduction, the play began. The first scene demonstrated the fragility of life so completely that from then on, I was expecting the proverbial bucket to be kicked at any moment. A dead lamb lay in the middle of the stage as a bedraggled young man tenderly sung a prayer for it in a foreign language, patting its soft limp wool as the barrel of a gun is suddenly shoved into his face. Two women stood at the other end of it, shaking with fear and bravado. They discussed with sparse dialogue the option of killing the young man, before hesitating to decide otherwise. The loaded gun sat on the woman’s hip, threatening hostility for the rest of the scene. The tension between the two central characters, sisters Anna and Bec (played by LJ Wilson and Jane Angharad), ebbed and flowed as new characters were introduced. The appeal of the deteriorating and lonely property was at first a mystery, with waning lambing numbers and no money flowing in, but it becomes clear that for those with nowhere to be such as the man revealed to be named Guy Tree (played by Saro Lepejian), a job and a place to sleep are profoundly valuable.
After the trio’s tense beginning, they settle into an unusual but familial way of life. The repetition of the conversations, along with the complete lack of non-diegetic sound created a black hole of time for them to fall into. It could have been weeks, or years, as they paced back and forth over the dirt-strewn ground. The costuming by Aloma Barnes and set design by James Smithers left little to the imagination. Actors walked on and off the square wooden stage that sat in the middle of the theatre space in order to change or adjust costuming between scenes. We could see the characters transform in front of our eyes.
Bare sound design by Kieran Camejo and harsh cool lighting by Travis Kecek added a chill to the air. Despite this complete transparency of the inner workings of the performance, the actors firmly held us in the story, never breaking the illusion that we were in the middle of a cold, barren British farm. While both sisters were played with such nuance that I both pitied and appreciated them for their mistakes, the standout performance was that of James Smithers, playing their useless and deranged brother, Ben. His confrontational presence hovers over the careful familiarity that the sisters have found with Guy, returning after deserting the farm many years ago. Smithers bursts onto the stage with snark, but slowly reveals Ben’s traumatic past, allowing us to empathise with a character that could easily have been dismissed as a hateful ghost of their past. Mark Langham gives another standout performance as the memory of their grandfather slowly going mad, his cognisance of this making it all the more heartbreaking.
The real antagonist of this play was time, relentless and repetitive. Gundog takes place over months, years, and decades with no time stamps other than the death of sheep and family. Time stretches and cycles through the days with no end in sight. Time takes the sanity from the girls' grandfather, and kindness from their brother – who is reduced to a rage-filled shell by the time the performers take their final bow.
The repetition and the sparseness of the play stretch time out so effectively that the close to two-hour run time does become exhausting mid-way through. I noticed my body had tensed throughout the play when a sudden noise startled me so much that I almost pulled a muscle. I wonder whether the chairs in the theatre had been chosen specifically to be hard and uncomfortable, adding to the ambience of arduousness that director Anthony Skuse had so carefully constructed. It felt as though all the hope for change had been sucked out of that space, that the characters – and by extension, the audience – were doomed to repeat the mistakes of our past.
Gundog is a brilliant and bleak work, the despair of it seeps into you for days after you’ve left the theatre. It is an unpleasant experience to face the loneliness of time stretching and repeating itself across barren farmland on stage, but the beauty of Simon Longman’s writing allows his audience to grapple with this feeling and question their own motives for survival whilst coming away relatively unscathed.
Gundog played at the Kings Cross Theatre from 3 - 18 March. Find more information here.
Images by Clare Hawley
Rebecca Cushway is a radio host blessed with the most luxurious radio voice in the Inner West and burdened with the ability to do everything everywhere all at once. She’s not nearly as smart as the undergrads she tutors at UTS think she is.
This review was generously donated by Bec.
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