Appreciation continues to build after the action ends
IF there was ever a time for plays about people cooped up with other people, it’s now. Simple Acts of Malice gives us a day in the lives of Elaine and Bones, both clinging to something indefinable and trying to believe it’s each other.
Over the course of a day (or, in stage time, an hour) the pair flirt, try to be romantic (Elaine ludicrously instructs Bones what to do while he’s kissing her), bicker, wind each other up (“Each of of us hopes the other will crack first”) and wallow ecstatically in the gory details of a (real or imaginary) crime they once committed.
The next day dawns. Bones looks out the window: “Nothing in the sky but more sky.” That says it all, really.
The programme notes a debt to Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, and the link to early Absurdism is discernible in the play's discordance and nihilism. There are hints of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and, especially in Bones’ dialogue, Pinterism. Yet Simple Acts of Malice is located firmly in the New Zealand of MallowPuffs, Kentucky Fried and walks in the Waitakeres.
Interestingly, the characters were created by performers Barbara Power and Simon O’Connor before Vincent O’Sullivan wrote the script. Power’s Elaine is brittle and pretentious, something of a harridan with rollers that never come out of her hair, suggesting endless preparation for something that never quite happens, and obviously drawnon eyebrows: at one point Bones refers to her as his “darling slag”. O’Connor’s Bones is cynical and amoral, his whitepainted face recalling Ubu’s mask. His sidekick is a knife called Alfonso.
This is one of those plays that get better and better the more you think about them: my appreciation didn’t peak until I was halfway home. O’Sullivan, Power and O’Connor, combined with excellent direction by Richard Huber, have given us much to enjoy and ponder.