Boy Swallows Universe review – a triumphant and timely reminder of why we need live events
Boy Swallows Universe, adapted for the stage by Tim McGarry from Trent Dalton’s runaway bestselling novel, is a gritty, raucous, and mystical juggernaut of a play that prosecutes a booming argument for the supremacy of the live theatre experience. Director Sam Strong battled multiple threats of lockdown to bring his vision to the stage, right up to opening night. That he won proves optimism pays, at least some of the time.
Strong and McGarry translate Dalton’s free-wheeling, almost 500page epic into physical space by leaning into the book’s most fantastical elements. Discourse and diversions drop away to leave a more concentrated and slightly weirder story on the stage. Symbols of trauma find heightened prominence: the red rotary phone takes centre stage with the mysterious caller’s face projected large onto a wall. In a world in which things don’t quite add up, absurdity steps in in the shape of non-sequiturs and oxymorons that provide comic relief in an otherwise harrowing story of gang wars, drug addiction, domestic violence and murder.
Set in 1980s Brisbane, Boy Swallows Universe is a bildungsroman narrated by 12-year-old Eli Bell, played by Joe Klocek, who most recently starred as the young version of Eric Bana’s character in The Dry. At 26, Klocek is twice Eli’s age. Yet he’s proven himself capable of creating a complex character interesting enough for an adult audience but somehow believable as a teen. Tom Yaxley plays Eli’s older brother August, who scrawls cryptic aphorisms in the air with his index finger: “Your end is a dead blue wren.”
Time and trauma are twinned preoccupations in the play, as in the novel. After an unspeakable event in early childhood caused his perception of time to malfunction, Eli frequently finds himself standing inside moments of trauma. Movement director Nerida Matthaei’s powerful choreography embodies Eli’s psychic wounds in mesmerising balletic episodes in which we witness time stretch, dissolve, and eventually disappear.
Screen actor Michala Banas is devastating as Frankie, the boys’ heroin-addicted mother whose dealer husband forces her to go cold turkey by locking her in a room for seven days, humiliates her by forcing her to eat dog food, and leaves her bloody and bruised in an off-stage bashing. Anthony Gooley is appropriately despicable in the role (but even better as Brian Robertson, the gruff and hardened editor of the Courier-Mail). In a play where casual violence prevails, the graphic violence visited upon Frankie is hardest to take for its realism.
Slim Halliday, who babysits the boys while Frankie and Lyle are out dealing drugs, is played to perfection by Anthony Phelan. Slim, who twice escaped from Boggo Road Gaol, warns the boys not to take their freedom for granted: “These are your sunshine hours,” he tells them. “You can make them last forever if you see all the details.”
Phelan delivers an equally commanding performance in his secondary role as prosthetic limb and drug merchant Tytus Broz. At Tytus’s birthday party, Australian-Vietnamese actor Ngoc Phan playing “Back Off” Bich Dang belts out a ballad wearing a sensational green dress that rivals Kiera Knightley’s gown in Atonementfor memorability. But it’s her knife-wielding son Darren Dang, played by the hilarious Hoa Xuande, who steals the show.
A thumping 80s soundtrack and designer Renée Mulder’s genius eye for details winds the clock back. The rotary stage ensures the play’s dozens of scenes scenes are in constant movement. In one scene, Frankie runs for her life against the direction of rotation. In another, Eli and his crush sit on twin benches that revolve in a train ride to nowhere.
Video designer Craig Wilkinson has recreated the city of Brisbane with towering images of its landmarks – Boggo Road Gaol, Story Bridge, the City Hall clock tower – projected onto the three walls of the set. The use of video allows the set to dissolve reality into fantasy and back again at rapid speed. In one moment the set is a Vietnamese restaurant in Darra; in the next, excerpts of handwritten letters are unfolding on the walls: “I will remember this moment … I will remember the end, through the beginning.”
If trauma slows time down, love speeds it up. Love is Eli’s vehicle of escape: his familial love for his mother drives him to dream of a safe and stable life in Brisbane’s cul-desac-ridden suburb of the Gap, and his romantic love for Caitlyn Spies, a Courier-Mail reporter who mentors him in the journalistic art of turning questions into answers, opens an emergency door.
On opening night at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, an enthusiastic flourish of Darren Dang’s samurai sword accidentally shattered a naked light bulb, prompting a hasty curtain drop while the glass was cleared. Klocek and Xuande’s brief unmasking and their extemporised return to scene minutes later was a triumphant and timely reminder of why we love, and need, live events. Shit happens and on you go.
Boy Swallows Universe is on until 3 October at the QPAC Playhouse