Three on, one off

‘Three On, One Off’ is a West Australian drama written by Lucy Eyre for Shanghai Lil Productions. This world premiere is showing at the main auditorium, Subiaco Arts Centre, 180 Hamersley Road, Subiaco until Saturday 24^th October, All shows at 8.00 pm.

         In Perth, young mining safety officer, Tom (Nick Candy) is saying goodbye to his wife Maggie (Renee Newman-Storen) as he heads out bush to a mining site, where an accident has taken place. Maggie is pregnant, but he will be back in three weeks, and besides she has her mother (Sarah McNeill) nearby and an ante-natal facilitator to advise her on the baby’s development.

         On arriving at the site Tom is greeted by site manager, Mick (Phil Miolin) and his ocker team. Davo (Jeremy Levi) is a hard worker, after all ‘the bonus’ is everything. Then there is truck driver, Dazza, ‘one of the boys’ (Alexandra Vines? Alex Jones?) who is concerned about an ongoing safety aspect.

        Manager Mick gets yet another phone call from Owen, the company’s project manager (Igor Sas) with concerns regarding their targets and delivery dates.

Lucy Eyre wrote a play called ‘Conundrum’, which rotated around real characters; once again, Lucy has produced some true-to-life personalities. The script is amazingly convincing of life on a mining site, it is very well observed and an eye-opener to a city lad like myself. The dialogue was a mix of regular Australian English and, in some scenes, of strong Strine which I found a little difficult to tune into.

The show was advertised as 75 minutes, and the performance that I saw was actually nearer 90 minutes, and yet my only gripe was that even this was too fast to absorb, and truly feel deep sympathy for, or empathy with, the characters. Their ups and downs, their tragedies – despite superb acting, especially by the female actors of the cast, with very good directing (Emily McLean) and dramaturgy (Reg Cribb) - I was left slightly unmoved.

It was good to see how the workers, especially Mick, enjoyed their time off, and how Owen behaved under stress. Some fine acting.

The storyline had several very good threads to it. With quick scene changes between the mine, the couple’s home and several other venues, the interest kept growing.

The set and costume design by Brad Reid, was very convincing as the red dust, Hell hole. A simple TV sized AV system was most effective in setting the scene and giving information. Mike Nanning’s lighting picked out the various areas of the stage action, but occasionally the next scene was fully lit well in advance of the current scene ending – great for increasing the tempo, but here it gave too much pace when some slow blends would have been more effective.

The demands made of the sound designers, Simon Dreyer & Clinton Lund, were complicated and unusual, but they easily satisfied the requirements. You were in the pit area!

With such a big industry on our doorstep it was good to have such a fascinating insight. Tickets are a good price, most enjoyable – really recommended.