'Inky', Complete Works Theatre Company

Originally posted on the Arts Hub Australia website. By Laura Smith. There's a big "but" hanging over Inky. The set, lighting, and sound were wonderful, mainly because someone remembered something that is too often forgotten in theatre - that design elements are there not just to look good, but also to add meaning to some main theme of the play. The set serves a dual purpose in setting up the play. Here we have a story about a woman who is obsessed with Muhammad Ali, and views all the scenes of her life as a series of boxing matches, to be won, not just survived. Inky has come from some impoverished part of Russia to work as a nanny for a privileged family with taste and raging battles, who never have enough. The wife, Barbara, is trying desperately to learn to love her children, while the husband, Greg, is trying desperately to satisfy his wife. In the centre of the stage are two expensive white couches, sleek and modern, exactly the kind that such a couple would have. Four clean white bands run from one side of the stage to the other, spread from knee to ceiling height in the kind of stark interior design that such a couple are likely to choose. The white bands are also the ropes of the boxing ring encircling the life-bouts in the home. The sound (performed by the Wintership Quartet) worked into the same metaphor - each scene of the play was divided by a bell and ended with a victory and a defeat. There's something calming in a set that works so simply, that so easily passes on the metaphor and gives the director opportunities to refer to it without becoming a distraction. It's almost a pity that Rinne Groff didn't allow herself to write more. Much of Inky's dialogue and character construction came in the form of quotes from Muhammad Ali. Beautiful quotes, well delivered, but one of most rewarding moments in the play is when Inky talks about the two different ways that men can touch a woman. In this moment Groff didn't use quotes but wrote poetic lines for Inky that settled comfortably into the surrounding dialogue. In choosing to have Inky express herself mainly through quotes from Muhammad Ali she seems to have strangled many moments that she could have written in, herself. The physical performances were superb – Kellie Jones as Inky did a great job of miming the baby, while the Roderick Cairns’s physical transition between Greg as defeated lover and Greg as defeated fighter crawling through the ropes was seamless. Many of the movement decisions made by director Jacquelin Low were stylised, blocked and timed to give aesthetically pleasing tableaux, which worked well with the stylised set and stylised lighting. But all these stylised design and directorial decisions waver when it comes to the emotions of the characters. The director hasn't resolved the pull between sculpting the show into a comedy with comedic timing and embellished gestures, and the play's demand to be directed as a drama, with emotional integrity. As it was, there was something a little hollow about each of the characters, because they weren't stylised all the way but didn't fill the gap with believable realism in the moments of drama. This meant that it was difficult to empathise with any of the characters and some of the tense domestic scenes dragged. But this is not the big "but" hanging over the production. The big "but" is based on the ending. There seemed to be no relief of the tension built up throughout the play. We reached a climax, but the resolution was rushed so that although each of the characters had altered and grown, we didn't really see what it was that they were going to become. We didn't get a sense of how Barbara (Eleanor Howlett) was going to respond to the new Greg, how the new Greg was going to treat the new Inky, or how the daughter, Ally, was going to respond to the new Barbara. There was no wind-down to conclude the play, just a chaotic moment with Ally rushing onstage and spouting more Ali quotes, and somehow this sudden real-life appearance of a child who had been imagined throughout the play threw all my perceptions of the family, and left me unsatisfied.