Tribes by Nina Raine

Hey blogettes,

On my continuing journey down the rabbit hole that is the Melbourne theatre scene I found myself seated next to a man that smelt decidedly like mothballs in MTC's gorgeous Sumner Theatre.

Shaking off the urge to douse the man in my glass of red wine (vinegar vs mothballs, I think vinegar wins...just. Although I did have to deal with the smell of souring wine on my 14 hour plane ride to Abu Dhabi last September, but that is a story for another time!) I settled in for the production of "Tribes".

As the lights came up we were confronted with an open plan set, a kitchen table, a couch, a fridge. There were also building materials scattered upstage, witches hats and temporary fencing, giving off the idea that perhaps this family was not as complete as the characters would have us believe.

The tribe is an intellectual, bourgeois family, showing their love through argument, rationality and writing. Their arguments revolve around language and its inadequacies, fitting considering they have a deaf son, Billy. Billy has been raised to be "hearing", that is, not taught sign language, but to lip read and speak, out of the fear that his identity would revolve around his deafness.

The first act was strong, and the writing so witty, one line has been deemed my quote of the night. The patriarch of the family, played by Brian Lipson, declares that listening to a Northern speak is like, "Being fucked in the face by a crab!". For it to be funny, you need to imagine a 60 year old Russell Brandt delivering the line. Gold.

Although conflict defines this family, almost to the point of melodrama, the turning point in the play comes when Billy meets Sylvia. She, unlike Billy, was born into a deaf family, and is now, courtesy of a hereditary condition, going deaf herself. Sylvia guides Billy into the deaf community and it is here he finds his voice.

The metaphors are stretched very thin in Nina Raine's second production. Billy's sister, whose name escapes me, is a fledgling opera singer and their older brother, Dan, is slipping into psychosis, the type where auditory hallucinations are involved. Billy's empathetic mother is in the midst of developing a detective novel. Cool, we get it, everyone has a voice, but of course we want them to shut up when it's being broadcast at 8006043 decibels.

The second act unravelled so quickly, so many life changing events happen to our characters and we're going from one situation to the next without being able to process the outcomes or consequences. And neither can our characters, and at this point the performance began to lose authenticity. The heart felt scenes between Sylvia and Billy, where they combine sign and vocals to communicate were beautiful, and the usage of onstage screens to act as "translators" added humour. The climactic scene in which Billy confronts his family was also beautiful. Alison Bell, as Sylvia, delivers a performance so nuanced, so heart breaking and so genuine that she saved the second act for me. 

Tribes was more relevant to me than Summer of the Seventeeth Doll and I did enjoy the cracking dialogue. I feel that if the script was refined a little more, with elements being removed (the unnecessary moving stage that added nothing...), this play could be a real ripper.

***1/2

Sylvia and Billy

The three siblings

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