It’s the end of football season, and Adelaide’s 27-strong Panorama Pirates rugby team are ready to blow off steam the only way they know how. Toby (Andrew Steel), Reed (Anthony Taufa), Len (Matt Zeremes), team captain Doug (Gus Murray) and their teammates (also played by this cast of four) plan to drink 10,000 beers across one Wild Weekend in Sydney. And yes, the beer in question is almost invariably VB (the one visible can of Hahn Premium Light in the production is obviously some sort of mistake).
With sporting determination, they make their way from George Street and World Square to the Cross and Woolloomooloo, from Star City to Bondi, leaving a trail of spilled drinks, piss and vomited kebabs in their wake. At some point you just know there’ll be a Cold Chisel singalong.
It’s a promising concept – especially considering playwright Alex Broun’s experience as a rugby journalist. But Broun doesn’t seem to draw on that experience where it counts. Sure, there’s plenty of the talk you’d expect from rugby players on the footy field, even some of the brutal poetry of the commentary box, but when it comes to compelling, hard-hitting insights into rugby culture off the field, 10,000 Beers gets about as far as ‘Man! These guys drink a lot!’
In fact, the main experience Broun seems to be drawing on is as a writer of ‘ten-minute plays’ and his time as the director of the annual short play smorgasbord Short + Sweet. Just like Short + Sweet, 10,000 Beers is cobbled together from fleeting fragments of scenes, throwaway skits and one-idea vignettes. Which would almost work as check-your-brain-at-the-door entertainment-for-the-masses, except that 10,000 Beers is also aspiring to be serious, thought- and emotion-provoking theatre.
It isn’t that. Generally, 10,000 Beers is too busy goofing off to try to make us care about any one of its 27+ characters. Occasional oases of drama come across as contrived and disingenuous, and a broadly drawn overarching story surrounding the ball-hogging captain, in particular, is a dodgy manoeuvre that not even the dimmest ref would let slide.
Theatre has always been a contact sport for director Lee Lewis, though, and you can trust her to bring her A game to an unwinnable match. With a crack team of designers, she manages to capture not only the energy of a grand final game but the natural choreography of a team of rugby players, and also deftly and dynamically manages taxi collisions, bus rides, punch-ups and demented montage sequences. In and of itself, her direction is thrilling and extremely theatrical. The actors, too, literally work up a sweat in excellent comic and physical performances.
Ultimately, though, 10,000 Beers falls far short of the try-line. Actually, for a show being described as an examination of footy yob culture, it’s somewhat disturbing that it tends to come off as a boozy celebration of it. Like a floodlit sporting field at night, there’s a lot of darkness lurking on the edges here – if only this play truly had the balls to go there.
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