Max Gillies and Tony Martin in The Seed | Fairfax Studio (Pic: Jeff Busby)
It should have been a cracker. A sharp and deeply personal script. A talented and experienced cast. Sadly for the audience, The Seed is more a damp squib.
The story is promising. Three generations of the Maloney family — daughter, father and grandfather — come together to celebrate their collective birthday in a living room in Nottingham. For Rose (Sara Gleeson), a writer, this is her chance to excavate her family history; it’s the first time she’s met her grandfather and she’s brought along her dictaphone to record his memories. For her dad, Danny (Tony Martin), it’s his return to the mother country to face his father and the life he fled. For her grandfather, the staunch Irish republican Brian (Max Gillies), it’s time to show his family who’s still in charge.
In an extraordinary coincidence, not only is it all their birthdays, it’s also Guy Fawkes Night. But in Brian’s house there’ll be no celebration of the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot. To him, Guy Fawkes is a kindred spirit: they both wanted to blow the English dogs sky-high. Brian sees himself as a soldier of the IRA and he’s bred a family of fighters. Danny fought in Vietnam and is still bearing the scars. As for Rose, her battles are more personal, but she’s just as strong as the men.
Here the production falters. The Maloney family are tough nuts, hard and resilient and quick to anger. In director Anne-Louise Sarks’ production, however, we never see their fighting spirit — everyone’s a bit too ponderous and heavy.
This wasn’t helped, on opening night, by some fluffing of lines and slow cues. This will likely right itself over the next week, but the central problem won’t be solved: the peculiar casting.
Max Gillies is beloved as one of Australia’s finest satirists, with decades of experience in political comedy on stage and television. He is a gifted stage clown and that’s not a natural fit for the tough and bitter fighter, Brian. His own son and granddaughter are terrified of him but we see no reason for this in this production. At Brian’s retelling of some of the violent acts he committed for the IRA, there was laughter in the audience, as if it was all part of some elaborate joke.
There’s obviously an expectation for Gillies to be comic and a strong performance could have shaken this off to deliver a blistering and stinging surprise to the audience. This isn’t that performance, however, and we get more old codger than tough tyrant.
Tony Martin’s Danny fares better as the Vietnam vet who is caught between worlds. Born in Nottingham to an Irish father, Danny left for Australia as a ten-pound pom when his family got too much for him. It’s a strong performance but it doesn’t reach the peaks required when he finally is forced to confront his father over the past.
The play itself is particularly autobiographical and told almost entirely from daughter Rose’s point of view. Part narrator, part provocateur, Rose reveals herself to the audience in an honest, raw and not always flattering manner.
When the play was first performed in 2007, in Sydney at Downstairs Belvoir, the playwright Kate Mulvany played the part of Rose. When I saw Mulvany play the role, it was an extraordinary performance where she, as both actor and playwright, was in complete control of the stage.
Sara Gleeson has quite the challenge to live up to. There’s an extra layer of removal here: it’s not her own story she’s telling. The difference is most striking when we see Rose at her most vulnerable: Gleeson skims over the hard flinty rage of the character, we see a much nicer, less thorny Rose and lose the deep resonance of the writer unflinchingly revealing herself and her own dark fears on the stage.
The staging puts the focus squarely on the actors. Played out on the stripped back Fairfax stage (design by Christina Smith), the lighting (Matt Scott) and sound design (Jethro Woodward) keep our attention firmly fixed on the performances of the cast.
We expect fireworks. We get more of a fizzle.
The details: The Seed is at the Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne, until April 4. Tickets on the MTC website.
