Most advice for first-time Australian playwrights goes something like this: “Write a two-hander, three at most. Make sure it’s a single setting with a strict chronology. Stick as close to naturalism as possible. Keep the themes simple and clear. And write what you know.” New playwright Dan Lee has pretty much ignored every one of these dicta in his work Bottomless – except the last one, which he embraces with gusto. Write what you know.
His play is set in a dry-out facility in Broome, where a youngish man named Will (Mark Wilson) has been stationed, newly sober himself and full of reformation zeal. He comes up against the facility’s coordinator Claudia (Margaret Harvey), who’s seen his like before and expects him to be as useless as the five people who’ve preceded him. Her brother Jason (Mark Coles Smith) is a wilful drunk, and various regulars – Julie Forsyth’s Suzie, Alex Menglet’s Boxey and Jim Daly’s Jimmy – strike her as hopeless cases, beyond redemption. Will says he has a plan, but she’ll be damned if she’ll fall for that shit again.
The play begins in a naturalistic mode, with Will’s tendency towards expansive and even lofty language constantly getting undercut by Claudia’s prosaic pragmatism. But Lee is a writer who is more comfortable with the elevated register, and the naturalism starts to slide away, into something more challenging and abstruse. The imagery becomes almost feverish – from an ant grasping towards the heavens, to prisons that try to keep townspeople out rather than inmates in – and the play’s dramatic structure totters forward, invoking the bizarre machinations of the drunken mindset. The effect may be unwieldy and overstuffed, but at least it feels rich. At least it has ambition.
Some of the performances are fantastic, but director Iain Sinclair struggles to get them working together with any unified tone. Will is ostensibly the audience’s entry point, our everyman, but Wilson’s portrayal is wildly unpredictable and ultimately unknowable. He’s an actor who strips away anything superfluous in his performances, but here it feels like he’s stripped away the texture and the vulnerability too; it’s impressive but it isn’t moving. Forsyth, Daly and Menglet let loose as town drunks, allowing their humanity to shine through like gold dust in the bottom of a muddy pan. Best of all is Coles Smith, who electrifies the stage as the charming and dangerous Jason.
The staging is the definition of simplicity, with a single wire fence proving incredibly adaptive and evocative. Sinclair brings dynamism to the blocking, and Andy Turner’s lighting is sparse and functional. Russell Goldsmith’s sound design is a mini work of genius, full of croaking frogs and crackling thunder. The production makes little visual concession to Broome itself, which serves to highlight the dream-like, almost fantastical role the town plays in the work. Lee clearly worked and dried out in Broome, and the play requires no more verisimilitude than this.
In some ways, as MTC’s recent Astroman highlighted, a play’s length needs to match its ambitions. That play was far too long; this one isn’t really long enough. Massive ideas, about the solidarity of addiction, about a community’s responsibility to its failures, about humanity’s disconnect with its environment, course through this work, but aren’t given the time and the air to breathe or develop. The characters, too, are only initial sketches, outlines that require colour and shade but aren’t given the space to crystallise. In Bottomless, Lee has fashioned a first work that pulsates with potential rather than coheres into a satisfying whole, but is presumably a taster for greater things to come.