It’s the middle of the night in a dark and abandoned building site in Western Sydney but Russ (Russell Kiefel), Perry (Perry Keyes), Meynedog (Meyne Watt) and Effie (Effie Nkrumah) haven’t got anywhere else to be. Effie and Perry are meant to be keeping the site safe and guarded but that doesn’t stop all four clambering over the scaffolding, playing football with the detritus or scuffling on the dusty floor. They’re in a state of high-level boredom, drinking the night away and waiting for we’re not sure what. When Haz (Hazem Shammas), a former workmate enters with a girl he’s picked up on the street (Valerie Berry), we might expect something to change, but it doesn’t. The six banter, bicker and swear but what drives them to do so remains largely concealed.
The dialogue, a shared invention of the six cast members and writer Raimondo Cortese, is of the short and sharp yet vaguely circuitous and elliptical style audiences might recognize from writers such as Martin Crimp, Tom Holloway or even the master of opacity, Samuel Beckett, but lacking the underlying threat and danger those writers so often capture. It may yet have been saved with some consistently punchy delivery but the pacing was strangely halting and lacklustre on opening night. Watt and Shammas bring raw energy and a sense of purpose, and Nkrumah eases into the rhythm as the night goes on, but Kiefel feels consistently a beat behind the line and sucks what tension there might be out of most of his interactions.
Buried City is billed as an exploration of life in an urban centre in the throes of major sociological, technological and economic upheaval, but the performance is 90 minutes of stasis. Six people arguing about the location of a phone or who gets to drink what is not the same as dramatic conflict, and Buried City fails to answer the questions that might make such an event compelling: who are these people? What is it about their gathering on this night that makes them worth watching? Why do they care, or not care, about each other? In the last moments of the play, a heated argument breaks out between Haz and Russell about new and old models of labour and economics. This is clearly the central issue uniting and dividing these characters, and why it’s saved for the final 15 minutes isn’t clear. Buried City demonstrates the dangers of conflating the character’s experience (boredom) with the audience’s, and in the process wastes an opportunity to say something noticeable about the kinds of people whose stories rarely make it to the mainstages. In ambition admirable, in execution disappointing, Buried City could aspire to so much more.
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You've hit the nail on the head: "Buried City demonstrates the dangers of conflating the character’s experience (boredom) with the audience’s". By the end, I couldn't tell if I was witnessing boredom or experiencing it myself.
Posted on Fri 03 Feb 2012 03:47:14