Review: Tongue Tied has trouble focusing on its real subject
Written by Clare Hennessy, Directed by Sarah Hadley
Review by Charlotte Smee
There are a couple of genres of films and tv shows that are my go-to guilty pleasures. One of them is romantic comedies, and the other is stories about journalists. Stories about journalists are hard to get right - and because there are so many, there’s a high risk of falling into cliché territory. Morning Glory is a trashy rom-com favourite of mine about journalists, starring Rachel McAdams as a chipper young producer trying to make a failing tv show better. Great News is a hilariously poignant TV show about a breakfast news journalist whose mum decides to intern with her, and Inventing Anna tells the too-strange-to-be-fake story of fake heiress Anna Delvey as the unbelievably persistent journalist unravels it. On the darker end sits Bombshell, the sometimes shallowly told story of three women who decide to speak out about being sexually assaulted by their CEO at Fox News.
Tongue Tied is a new Australian play about a journalist, specifically one named Mia (Eloise Snape) looking to tell the story of Sarah Donaldson (Alex Stamell), a young employee of the company “Sunday Juice” who is (allegedly, in journalist speak) sexually assaulted by the CEO Jonathan Hayes (Michael C Howlett). Unfortunately, it falls into the well-worn trap of focusing too much on the “chase” of the story, rather than the characters that drive it.
The play opens with all of the characters sitting in lime green office chairs along the back wall, design by Cris Baldwin giving the effect of the lobby in an eerily bleak corporate office. Then, Mia steps forward with her black handbag in tow, dressed in a white shirt and black pants. She steps forward and takes her seat at the long white conference table, and waits. Across from her, on the opposing wall, is a towering screen playing footage of Jonathon smiling, throwing up a shakkas, and otherwise being upbeat in corporate — with the words “BOSS BABE” in pink lettering appearing over his face at the end of the loop. The footage is hilarious and could have been used better to get us on board with Mia straight away.
Clare Hennessy’s writing is very funny in parts, with clever one liners like “PR is all about PR-tending everything’s fine,” and “you’ve made it this far without that self-doubt crap that makes female writers really intolerable”. The “Sunday Juice” company is ripe for the pun-picking, and the backstory of how it came to be is great, as lovingly told by PR Manager Parker Farrington-Smythe (Kieran Clancy-Lowe). Otherwise, Hennessy tips too far into universality over specificity. Gail (Di Adams) is like a newspaper editor straight out of a movie, sharp-tongued and pushy, and Mia is the self-righteous journalist we all love to hate. When Mia comes up against Parker, they have some interesting repartee, but this devolves into exactly what you’d expect; they end up sleeping together, and Mia has a somewhat repetitive crisis about sleeping with her source.
Near the end of the play, we hear from Sarah — who otherwise only features in short bursts while on the phone to Mia — in a scene where she sees her former boss at the cafe she now works at. He’s accompanied by his new assistant Holly (Clementine Anderson), and there is a great sense of the things unsaid between them all; a glimmer of tension. He asks if he can talk to her, but she refuses, he leaves, and Holly stays behind on the pretense of feeling sick and needing to use the bathroom. The whispers of warning between Sarah and Holly start to get at something interesting and then the scene quickly snatches the answer away, expertly leaving us wanting more.
The final image is clever too; all of the characters leave, and we’re left with Sarah and Jonathon sitting at either end of the row of lime green chairs. There’s something between them - something we’ve been waiting to see the whole time, but never quite get to.
In focusing too much on Mia’s indiscretions, Tongue Tied ties itself up in knots and forgets to show us the big secret behind it all. We barely meet the perpetrator and victim of the crime at the centre of the plot until the end, and this makes it difficult for us to understand the lengths that the journalist is willing to go to in order to get the truth to print. A valiant attempt to tell a story told many times before — perhaps all it needs is something unique and specific to ground it in an Australian, post #MeToo context.
Tongue Tied plays at the Kings Cross Theatre until 26 November. Book tickets here.
Images by Clare Hawley
Charlotte is the editor of Kaleidoscope Arts Journal, a little enby and a big mess. Their friends regularly worry that they might overdose on theatre.
Like this review? Buy us a $5 coffee here. You can do it once, once a month or as many times as you like.
