Caress/Ache - Griffin Theatre

Overview

Caress/Ache, directed by Anthony Skuse for Griffin Theatre, feels like the moment immediately after you bust a piñata — there’s a whole heap of stuff spilling out in all different directions, fragmented chaos of varying quality.

The play tells a number of stories that loosely connect under the theme of touch, although with a heavy-handed projection containing germane biological facts preceding each scene, it tends to feel rather forced. Mark (Ian Stenlake), is a surgeon who has lost a patient and can no longer stand physical contact with Libby (Helen Christinson), his wife. Cameron (Gary Clementson) comes clean to his partner about a great deal of touching he did with another woman, and Alice (Zoe Carides) is a mother whose son is on death row, her fear being that he will be executed before she can embrace him again. A thread which follows Cate (Sabryna Te’o), a girl training to be a phone sex operator, is easily the funniest and probably the best executed of these.

Structurally, it is a play full of contradictions and sudden gear changes. Suzie Miller’s writing contains more than the odd cliche and careens rather wildly in tone from poetic to melodramatic to conversational and back again. The actors are staunch in their efforts to realise each scene truthfully, but titters from the audience during one particularly emotional scene were proof of the significant challenge posed by the dialogue.

This disunity persists at the design level. Sound design by Nate Edmondson contains a great deal of momentum and wonder; the problem is it belongs to a different show. It’s strange and disappointing to watch a man brood in a bath when the music dictates that Brian Cox come on and inform the audience about the birth of the universe. The bareness and sterility of the set does focus attention on the small moments of human contact, but at the same time it made many of the scenes feel as though they were being performed in a void. The introduction of a bath in the latter half exacerbated this problem — it is referenced by a couple of the performers while the rest of the cast were forced to act around it.

There are some genuinely nice moments in Caress/Ache; the difficulty is sorting them from story threads which strain furiously against each other, denying the piece cohesion. Caress/Ache is no papier-mache shell, but, like anything that’s been hit by a bat a couple of times, it doesn’t quite hold together.