The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas - Red Stitch

Overview

In Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, 17 scenes encircle the play’s central character, Anne, a woman who is everyone; a child, a terrorist, an artist. It’s an unstable narrative that forms a seamless backdrop to the work’s meditations on 20th-century obsessions.

Dennis Kelly’s The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas shares some aspects of this focus, but where the “attempts” of Crimp’s title are efforts at capturing the impossibility of fully knowing a person, here the ritual at the core of Kelly’s play is a systematic process of dread certainty, building up and destroying every atom of a man’s soul.

Ritual Slaughter opens with the ambiguous voices of a sustained, direct-address prologue, one that maps out the early life of Gorge Mastromas with painstaking clarity; each sentence another pin in a butterfly’s wings. Even here at the beginning, Kelly’s writing makes organic, dizzying leaps between clinical detachment and stylised poetry. Somehow, the scope of his vision is exhaustive enough to enfold both microscopic detail and grand epic.

While actor Dion Mills’ obvious relish for the text helps to keep this first, long section dynamic, the writer slyly introduces the play’s vein of jet-black humour and the uncertainties that begin to infect its narrators’ voices; the patches of time that “history does not record”. The twists and turns of Gorge’s deceit would spoil any retelling of the plot beyond this point, as the play enters a more conventional series of scenes between the central figure and other characters which hinge upon his constructed persona.

The initial restraint in the production’s AV design pays off in the wrenching impact of the play’s first real revelation, with Mills and Olga Makeeva’s faces projected onto the stage itself, throwing up the collision between the play’s increasingly contradictory worlds of narration and action in stark, simultaneous relief. Here and throughout this Australian premiere at Red Stitch, director Mark Wilson and his actors embrace the ebbs and flows of the text’s slow-burning build to devastating effect.

All of the ensemble cast are excellent, with Mills, Makeeva, Elizabeth Nabben and Richard Cawthorne joined by the company’s new graduate Jordan Fraser-Trumble. As Gorge, Cawthorne manages to wrap utter pathos in a magnetic physical presence, a combination that makes his character’s degradation hypnotising to watch.

It’s all too tempting to explain away a play where the ravages of mindless financial expansionism are intertwined with literal and abstracted violence as overt, didactic commentary. Nietzsche wrote that “whoever thinks that Shakespeare’s theatre has a moral effect, and that the sight of Macbeth irresistibly repels one from the evil of ambition, is in error … He who is really possessed of ambition beholds this its image with joy; and if the hero perishes by his passion this precisely is the sharpest spice in the hot draught of his joy.” In this way, Ritual Slaughter is much more than a stern parable about the morass of unknowable forces that govern the flow of power and wealth worldwide. Kelly puts that darkness inside a man, and he squeezes.

This is an intoxicating show, and bitterly rare among Melbourne theatre for a willingness to treat an audience as its equal.

Pictured: Richard Cawthorne and Elizabeth Nabben. Image by Jodie Hutchinson.