Beached – Griffin Theatre

Overview

Beached has a big premise: It's a satire about a 400kg teenager who dreams of a more adventurous, unencumbered existence. In order to get life-changing — or life-saving, more like — gastric bypass surgery, he submits to the surveillance of a TV show, whose team will 'help' him lose enough weight to go under the knife.

The new play by Melissa Bubnic, which won the 2010 Patrick White Playwrights Award and was shortlisted for the 2011 Griffin Award, puts both our society's fat-hate and reality TV obsession under the spotlight, all while spinning a tender tale of a frightened young man and his overprotective mother.

Does it live up to its ambitious promise? Not quite. It's ultimately a bit simplistic, and many of its biggest laughs come cheap, rather than from the displays of insight and wry revelation you expect from satire. But to fall short of greatness is no failure; Beached is still good and a winningly entertaining night at the theatre. Its compassion is its strength.

Director Shannon Murphy (Porn.Cake) and the creative team (designer James Browne, lighting designer Verity Hampson and sound designer Steve Toulmin) have come up with a complex system of camera rigging for the stage that unfolds and configures like a cross between a Polly Pocket and a panopticon. In the middle of it sits an immobile Artie (Blake Davis). Choosing how to portray Artie's size was always going to be the production's first challenge, and fortunately it's also one of their big victories. Artie's costume is less fat suit and more bulbous, flesh-coloured beanbag that the boy is unfortunately stuck to. It's the physical embodiment of sitting, nonliteral but completely convincing.

For some reason, Murphy and Davis have not matched that sense of weight and sedentariness through performance, and it does disrupt the illusion. Davis is not just nimble but fidgety, and he also speaks with an animated childishness that seems out of place in Artie's reality. As his mother, JoJo, Gia Carides is wonderful, both a hawk and a deer in headlights. The ever-excellent Kate Mulvany does a huge service to the role of Louise, Artie's Centrelink counsellor and Ideal Woman, finding the funny, neurosis and fragility in each line.

Even if it's involved biting off more than everyone could chew, there's a lot of heart and a lot of smarts on show in this lively production.

Image by Brett Boardman.