The Great Game

Overview

The program for The Great Game summarises its plot as 'Charles Darwin meets the Pussycat Dolls and together they set out for the Battle of Khartoum'. Don’t worry, I don’t know what that means either, even after seeing it. You’re on a trip deep into the Land of Quirk with this one, so don’t expect anything so prosaic as a definable storyline.

The show is constructed as a giant game of make-believe between two housebound and stir-crazy sisters. Exploring an untidy room, the floor strewn with papers around a desk crowded with scientific paraphernalia, Elizabeth (Charlie Laidlaw) and Georgiana (Katherine Connolly) rifle through old books and antique letters, play-acting the characters they read about. One minute they are austere ladies swapping Bible quotes, the next they are re-enacting tribal rituals, mimicking birds they find described in a biologist’s notes or indulging in romantic fantasies about a 19th century British colonial officer (Bernard Caleo).

The show is at once extremely batty and highly intellectual, with animal impressions and pants-on-the-head type clowning interspersed with elegantly articulated musings on history, social change, religion and other such weighty topics. It presents a jumble of disparate ideas, like an attic cluttered with curiosities, inexplicable odds and ends and occasional treasures.

From start to finish, the show is resolutely vague. While it is hinted from the outset that the sisters are modern women play-acting ladies of yesteryear who are in turn play-acting other characters, it is never explicit who they actually are, or where or when this is happening. They may be in an isolated house in rural Australia, the room may be their deceased father’s office — or their isolation and the deceased father may simply be melodramatic fictions. If any theme is central, it is loneliness and the obsessions and deep uncertainties it breeds.

I am loathe to criticise a consciously abstract piece like this for lack of plot or character depth — the sisters’ complete removal from context, even the context of their own identities, is significant in creating a mood of total isolation — but the resulting lack of impetus can leave it feeling adrift. The show, like its shut-in heroines, is very deeply involved in its own world and a few more windows open to the audience might have done it some good.

Even at its most esoteric, however, The Great Game is easy to enjoy. Connolly and Laidlaw are tirelessly enthusiastic performers who evoke the dynamics of a sibling relationship well. There is room for more subtlety in the performances though, especially in an intimate venue like La Mama, but the cast do get a lot of mileage from the audience by playing big and their antics keep the laughs coming.

The piece was first performed in 2012 as part of La Mama’s EXPLORATIONS program for developing new work. This is its first full season. Bless La Mama for helping bring this theatrical oddity into being, because as curious as it is, The Great Game certainly represents an individual and exploratory artistic voice.