In these doomy, divisive, very silent Munch scream times, there seems to be two reigning preoccupations, especially among progressives. The first: what kind of future awaits mankind and all the Earth, given our rapacious, post-industrial, apocalypse-inciting tendencies? The second: when our culture wars have such seemingly unbreachable battle lines, what collateral is there at the level of interpersonal relationships – and in particular, matters of the heart?
Similar to Flat Earthers (a new musical from a trio of young writers that debuted at the Hayes last year) Alana Valentine’s new play Nucleus asks whether love can survive fundamental differences between two people, or is it somehow separate? Yet, where Flat Earthers was incredibly gay (in both senses), riotously bonkers, and had its young lesbian lovers disagree on a very literal reality (“is the world round or flat?”) – Nucleus is prickly, sombre, and has its central duo of boomer one-night-standers at odds on the trickier level of personal values.
We meet Gabriel (prolific actor of the Aussie stage and screen, Peter Kowitz) first. Standing beneath a large glowing helix sculpture and on a luminous circular stage at the Seymour Centre, he monologues a blustering, gruff, self-aggrandising account of his long career as a nuclear engineer. Were it not for PM McMahon, he boasts, his site analysis would’ve seen Jervis Bay become a territory for a nuclear power station in the ’60s.
Nucleus places us in the collision path of the global political and the embodied personal...
Cassie Logart (Paula Arundell; The Master and Margarita, The Bleeding Tree), an anti-nuclear campaigner and pediatrician, has been his nemesis all the while. She’s also the person he can’t stop thinking about. This is even after he realises their hotel room liaison at an overseas conference was a femme fatale ruse, premeditated to blow up his reputation.
Cassie, who never does expose his infidelity, also can’t emotionally untangle from this man whom she considers to be professionally goading monstrous deeds. She’s as sharp-tongued as he is cantankerous, and both have outsized curiosity, stubbornness and ego (“I stopped nuclear war!” Cassie declaims at one point). Even as they hurl “scientifically literate slurs”, they respect each other as equals in argument.
Both, too, have a sweet, eccentric side. During a chance encounter by a hotel pool at dawn, they both find themselves despairingly pondering the question: “what is love, anyway?” What compels this irrational, cataclysmic reaction? Is it character? Proclivities? Something chemical, at the very core? Love is damage; it breaks as it binds.
Verity Hampson’s bright, undramatic, colour-tinged lighting; Laura Turner’s video projections of atoms at work on the circular stage; and sound designer Phil Downing’s achingly beautiful string interludes (is that a Max Richter violin?) all wash waves of grace over the warring, doomed pair.
However, for all the well-matched potency of the two leads and Andrea James’s (Jailbaby) capable direction, these characters aren’t entirely credible in their peculiar tenderness for each other, which has endured thirty years with only a few chance encounters in between. At times, the dialogue is too wadded in explanatory detail of the atom’s history and science. Still, there are flashes of piercing wisdom, cruel ironies, some odd charmed symbols (a shampoo bottle, a yellow bird), and an unspoken secret that tethers. The play’s final moments, steeped with the bare reality of wasted years and a fragile, fraught way ahead, sprung tears.
The first of Griffin’s 2025 season, Nucleus places us in the collision path of the global political and the embodied personal, and asks: what is worth fighting for?
Nucleus is playing until March 15 at the Seymour Centre, Chippendale. Tickets are $25-$72 and you can snap them up over here.
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