With delight and schadenfreude, Ash Flanders’ Commentary skewers the male artistic genius

Catherine Campbell, Adelaide University

Bold doesn’t even begin to describe Commentary, the new play written by Ash Flanders: an acerbic flaying of public and private personas.

Middle-aged film academic and former film maker Nick Atkinson (Gyton Grantley) is preparing the director’s commentary for a retrospective screening of his one film, Low, in the city’s film festival.

Made in his youth with his creative partner, Hamish (spoken of, but never seen), the once much-lauded film stars Saskia (Kate Cheel) playing a 14-year-old girl who is pursued by an older male, played by Hamish. But the real-life predatory behaviour of Hamish towards another young woman means the film goes from new classic to non-grata, and Nick’s film career is over.

Flanders’ delicious writing gives us characters turned inside out to show the gory visceral underside of human behaviour when confronted with their own lies and failings. It exposes the changing morality of what is accepted in “getting the shot” or creating art, alongside what is accepted in male behaviour in relationships.

A sure directorial hand

Petra Kalive directs a dream cast in this enjoyable and mercilessly sharp drama – part satire, part stark realism, with an excellent eye for revealing the duality and public vs private personas of each character and situation.

Mediated conversations abound: the ever-present auteur’s voice-over commentary of events, live zoom calls projected onto large side screens, filmed images, podcast interviews. We are constantly seeing the way these characters package and present themselves and their version of events.

Kalive’s sure hand and the constant presence of the “tech” staff, played by the actors and the play’s stage management team, as observers to events, is wryly placed and gives a cheeky nod to the idea of audience.

Shifting, shattering power dynamics

Grantley revels in the likeable, shambolic, charismatic anti-hero, shifting mercurially between opinionated charmer, slightly hopeless negotiator, defensive man of privilege and messy drunk.

He effortlessly draws us into Nick’s version of events in a finely nuanced portrayal. Nick is a man that is all-too familiar in arts, academic and public life, and Grantley lets us see him as Nick sees himself: the sun around which women orbit.

As the play progresses, the women chip away at the story he has created for himself and we watch the power dynamic shift and shatter.

Three actors play the six women who impact Nick’s life.

Anna Steen’s portrayal of Mish, Nick’s wife, is an immaculate study in the unequal effort women put into relationships. Steen inhabits each stage of their relationship with beautiful precision, from working hard to keep the relationship going, to gritty honesty at the play’s end.

As Anna, the journalist interviewing Nick for the film festival, Steen precisely embodies the smiling assassin of the news media. Her monologue about how the news cycle works is delivered with knowing aplomb in one of the best scenes in the play.

Shardae Santos is stunning as as Gen – Nick’s film student and lover – and Hamish’s daughter Frankie. Her performance is lively, nuanced, engaging and insightful, creating contrast in the agency and social background of each young woman.

Cheel is a highlight as Saskia, the actor made famous by a distressing, harmful scene in Low. Cheel gives us a slightly unhinged, manipulative and image-obsessed star, the end result of Saskia’s traumatic experience during the making the film – although Cheel brilliantly manages to leave us questioning whether Nick is being manipulated by Saskia in turn.

As festival programmer Clea (another of Nick’s former students and lovers), Cheel finds a steely reserve that refuses to take on Nick’s performative rants.

What are we to make of this?

Commentary explores duality: in the two clear playing spaces, in the doubling of the female roles, in the missing writing partner.

Flanders both plays with clear, vicious statements, and the spaces in between, where the audience is left to make their own moral judgement.

Matilda Woodroofe’s set is soaked in blues and evokes a film set. Nic Mollison’s wonderful lighting shows his considerable skill for evoking mood, and plays beautifully with the inside/outside spaces of the set. Unfortunately, Dan Thorpe’s soundscape is at times distracting, conjuring atmospheres or locations that seem at odds with the text.

Flanders and Kalive invite us into the constantly shifting moral world of the characters and then ask us to question where our own responses come from.

In the final scene between Nick and his long-suffering wife, her admission rouses a kind of serves-him-right laughter from the audience. On opening night, much of that judgement was extremely audible, with the audience freely calling out their agreement or judgements.

The play certainly invites those reactions, and I am interested to know if they were anticipated, encouraged and if subsequent audiences will be as vocal.

But I was among those who were vocal. The ending is a brilliant, shocking moment of poetic justice – I laughed out loud with delight and not a little schadenfreude.

Commentary is at State Theatre Company South Australia until September 5.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.