Comedy

This was my first visit to Lane Cove Theatre Company, I was met by warm greeters at the door. The intimate space then added to that cosy sense of community-mindedness. The warmth and passion of director Kathryn Thomas, delivering the acknowledgment of country and welcoming us, was a great start. I was excited for what lay ahead.

The Wednesday 11am session is, I can now confirm, a genuinely civilised way to experience theatre. It is also, the perfect hour for this attention-challenged reviewer to see Lally Katz’s Neighbourhood Watch; a hefty play dealing with some big issues centring the question of when and why we stopped knocking on each other’s doors.

The set divides the stage into two distinct domestic worlds. To one side, Ana’s home; layered with the sentimental clutter of a long life, ornaments and keepsakes crowding a shelf beside antique chairs upholstered in faded pink. To the other, the sparse, slightly chaotic territory of youth; a cream sofa with an ironing board for a companion. That ironing board is doing a lot of thematic work, as it turns out.

Directors Kathryn Thomas and Christopher O’Shea, use a creative light and sound design to split stage with real intelligence; symbolic darkness pooling around characters who are unheard or unreachable, light carving out the emotional temperature of each scene with quiet precision.

The play opens on Isobel Rabbidge as Catherine, standing alone in the dark. When the lights rise, what we see is a young person held together by very little; their melancholy is in their posture and anguish across their face. It’s a bold, wordless opening statement, and Rabbidge earns it. Christopher O’Shea’s Ken arrives to break the spell, and together they establish the housemate dynamic with warmth and comic ease, celebrating Kevin ’07, negotiating the competing distractions of World of Warcraft and compulsive ironing, gently circling each other’s wounds.

The neighbourhood assembles around them: the polished, self-contained Christina; the relentless Nancy with her Neighbourhood Watch clipboard; and Milova, whose dogged pursuit of friendship Ana meets with hostility. We see the collective loneliness, and we are frustrated by the missed connections.

Then Ana arrives in full. I found out later that Miriam Fagueret’s authentic and powerful performance is a stage debut! Her Ana is genuine, funny, heartbreaking and fierce, an eighty-year-old woman who has survived prisoner of war camps across three countries and is absolutely not about to be managed by anyone. Fagueret finds the dark comedy in Ana’s mistrust without ever softening what lies beneath it, and when the play shifts into its magical realist register; reaching back into wartime Hungary through gorgeous ensemble work, she anchors those sequences with a lived-in gravity that is quietly extraordinary.

The production’s best moments arrive when the cast moves as a collective. The ensemble, including Caitlin Clancy, Penny Day, Gabriel Jab’bar, Jack Stout and Luca Savini, create the bridge between past and present with a physical attentiveness that gives the magic realism its legitimacy. Being an opening session, there were a few stumbles; entirely forgivable, and in truth, the trust and responsiveness between Rabbidge and Fagueret in navigating those moments only deepened the sense of a tight-knit ensemble at work.

The second act darkens considerably. Catherine’s truth and Ana’s collide, and Rabbidge meets the challenge with a raw, heart-wrenching honesty. The chemistry between the two leads is the engine of the whole piece; you feel the unlikely love of this odd couple friendship, which makes its ruptures genuinely painful.

Neighbourhood Watch is a long piece, and it carries weighty themes: grief, isolation, trauma, the peculiar modern loneliness of living wall-to-wall with strangers. But it is lifted throughout by the warmth of its central relationship and by a company that clearly believes in what they’re making.

For the HSC students who will study this text, seeing it live is an extraordinary gift. For everyone else: this is exactly the kind of story that reminds you what theatre, and neighbourhoods, are actually for.

To book tickets to Neighbourhood Watch, please visit http://www.lanecovetheatrecompany.com.au.

Photographer: Paul Frontczak

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