Small and Tired

Overview

Kit Brookman’s Small and Tired is a gentle consideration of the Oresteia. Orestes (Luke Mullins) returns home for the funeral of his father, Agamemnon, to find his sister Electra (Susan Prior) has moved to the suburbs and his mother Clytemnestra (Sandy Gore) is cold as ever. In a current day Australian suburb, the blows of the ancient tragedy are meted out softly.

In both his writing and direction, Brookman renders the epic quotidian, which makes the whole palaver all the more ruinous. Instead of grand gestures, fidelities and obligations simply erode between characters. Just as the play reaches a particularly suffocating moment, Orestes describes to Clytemnestra how as a child he had imagined breaking out into the sky flying in a train — the tension here between desire and reality is almost unbearable.

Brookman’s script uses the train as metaphor for the long, chugging thing that is life and the cadence of his script echoes that of a train. Brookman’s words patter downwards, just as footsteps have worn paths in Mel Page's set of dried out lawn. Tom Hogan's sound design is irritatingly soft, which only enhances the sense that these people exist in a vacuum, where fate was decided long ago and everyone is indeed small and tired. Lighting designer Verity Hampson and set designer Page have captured the airlessness of an Australian summer, but here there are no big blue skies, only a low, dark horizon and a feeling of claustrophobia that Orestes very understandably tries to escape.

Electra's histrionic crisis midway through the piece initially seems to be an unprepared dramatic climax until we realise that this is but one moment in a long line of disappointments. Gore playing Clytemnestra delivers a devastating glance of casual disdain towards her daughter in this scene. Gore has an amazing face — her performance is upright and brazen. Mullins' performance as Orestes is exquisite, and he and Conroy achieve a moving, humorous depiction of love.

The only odd note is Electra’s hapless Aussie husband, Jim (Paul Gleeson), a keen gardener and hopeless bore. The character provides some comic relief and makes Electra more believable as a stir-crazy suburban housewife, but for the most part he sits outside the narrative.

Brookman and the rest of the team have created something delicate and true to life. Small and Tired is one long exhalation that will leave you gasping for air, in a good, cathartic kind of way.