Culture clash play seems out of date
Peggy Pickit Sees The Face Of God Circa Theatre, until October 12 Reviewed by Dileepa Fonseka
A new play at Circa Theatre is best when it traverses the monotony of suburban life – garage doors, extramarital affairs, and the ill-judged jokes of middle-aged white folk – but ‘‘post-colonialism’’? Not so much.
An all-in-one-room affair, translated from a German play by Roland Schimmelpfennig, Peggy Pickit Sees The Face Of God is being pitched to theatregoers as a post-colonial take on Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?
In this case, that one room is the suburban living room of Frank and Liz, who play host to their old friends Carol and Martyn, aid workers just returned from the developing world.
The production is well cast, and the four actors do a good job keeping things interesting. Gavin Rutherford’s upbeat Frank gradually and enjoyably grates on Rebecca Parker’s marginally unhinged Liz, while Patrick Davies’ portrayal of the relatively inoffensive Martyn is a good foil to his preachy and occasionally confrontational wife Carol (played by Fingal Pollock).
Jokes are well signposted, and if you miss them, chances are you’ve laughed at a similar joke before somewhere else.
The play is strongest when it explores the resentment of housewife Liz and allows her painful stretches of time to make others feel uncomfortable.
For a certain audience, those jokes about the monotony of suburbia and middle-class awkwardness will be enough.
But it’s when the play’s focus turns into a reflection on the experience of white saviours that it begins to feel out of date and out of place in a post-colonial and post-Christchurch world.
The lack of non-white characters in the play soon becomes problematic, too, with caricatures like a ‘‘local girl’’ with a sexually transmitted disease and a developing world child with health issues playing important parts in the story without having any real voice in the script.
Admittedly, that may have been the point. Perhaps this story isn’t about the pain of the developing world but how white saviours selfishly make that pain something that’s all about them.
If that’s the case, then the point is not particularly well made. If it isn’t, then the play’s point arguably isn’t worth making at all.