Richard Murphet’s latest play, The Darkening Sky, wears its noir influences on its sleeve. While it plays out across Melbourne’s inner-city suburbs, the writer/director has clearly moulded the work around the Los Angeles beat of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled crime fiction. There’s a Philip Marlowe-like detective at work here, as played with the requisite gruff exasperation by a gravel-voiced Tom Dent. Menacing forces muster in the shadows. Spies lurk around corners, and thugs stand over folks at the bar. Political machinations play out in backrooms, and there are two missing women wrapped up in this mystery.
What’s missing from the Chandler playbook, however, is the grand reveal. The meticulous unravelling of this whodunnit – or even what, exactly, was done – is deliberately obscured. Instead, we’re given shreds of clues tattered and worn-thin with age, preventing us from grasping the whole in a labyrinthian tale that spans seven decades.
Written by Murphet with the brutal beauty of a poet’s tongue – the Chandlerian gift – it’s essentially a one-man show around which Victorian Theatre Company has assembled an expansive cast. English import and treasured star of stage and screen Brian Lipson is our narrator, James, the sort of solitary older man who props up stools in the bars and cafes of St Kilda. Bringing with him a certain Shakespearean gravitas, it’s powerful stuff when Lipson first emerges, Prospero-like, from the darkness after a shimmering field of water is disturbed by the wind. Filmmaker Jak Scanlon creates this effect, which hauntingly opens the show. His visual cues intermittently appear throughout the work, projected ghost-like on the back wall of a believably lived-in bar set designed by Eloise Kent. She also handles costumes that convey three distinct periods, from post-war through the leather jackets of the '80s, right up to now.
James is lost in a reverie, trying to piece together fragments of his past. His oration is often overcome with painful spasms, as if physically wounded by scratching the scabrous parts of his scattered memory, one fingertip tapping as if to sound out an SOS.
The play opens with his childhood memory of birds circling above a car, driven erratically by his mother (Edwina Wren). Slowly we realise that she went by many names and appearances, might have been a political operative during the Cold War, and one day went away.
We also visit James as a naïve young man (Matthew Connell) who occasionally interacts with his older self. He’s besotted with an oddly distant girlfriend who sports the suitably Chandler-esque femme fatale name of Chantal St Clair (Rebekah Hill) and is often accompanied by strange acquaintances.
Sadly, the slim sketches of these women, so clearly central to James’ story, offer little for Wren or Hill to do. They are but phantoms floating in the breeze, and you can’t help but feel that Chandler would have made more of them. The same goes for most of the cast, including Dent’s burly detective, Anthea Davis and Mark Tregonning depicting several roles, and an oddly mute barman (Tony Reck).
The staging, too, is impressive but a touch too fussy. Key scenes play out in a raised tower, which seems surplus to requirements given that the bar area already stands in for many locations. An on-stage keyboard player, Adrian Montana, who also composed the play’s score, is lost in the space.
There’s no denying Lipson is magnetic. His performance holds us captive, but the blurred borders of this noir leave it feeling a little overlong and a touch frustrating in the end. Perhaps it would have played stronger as a solo show after all? But there is enough majesty and mystery here that allows you to lose yourself in the swirling eddies of The Darkening Sky’s ominous storm.