Dreams in White – Griffin Theatre Co

Overview

We all have private lives different to the ones we make public. And many of us assume that for every secret weird thing we have, uber rich people have 10. Extreme ambition and extravagant living seem to require a flipside.

It's a tension explored on stage in Griffin's Dreams in White, which is partially inspired by the murder of Melbourne businessman Herman Rockefeller, who knew his killers through a swingers site. Michael Devine (Andrew McFarlane) is a debonair property developer with a loving wife (Lucy Bell) and better-than-average relationship with his 18-year-old daughter, Amy (Sara West). But it's a life he doesn't get to return to after he harasses a couple, David (Steve Rodgers) and Paula (Mandy McElhinney), who hooked up with him via his sex ad once and have no desire to do so again.

Playwright Duncan Graham (Cut, Ollie and the Minotaur) does not take the obvious route in his storytelling, and that's a big part of what makes Dreams in White so appealing. It's a thriller in which you already know whodunnit, so the mystery is instead in seeing how a seemingly good man comes to be murdered by two other seemingly good people. We know Michael had a normal relationship with his wife, who never suspected his secret proclivities, but we assume this normal interaction rather than see it played out on stage. In fact, the husband and wife do not share a scene. Instead, we see Michael's sweet side through his relationship with his daughter.

Their revealing late-night chats are singly the thing that gives Dreams in White great depth. The friendship and understanding he shows her, and the way he encourages her self-respect while she's going through typically dubious teen relationship experiments, seem in contrast to the man he is on the side — and yet also somehow essentially a sign of it, since he might not have that flexibility if not for his own experience with deviance.

The performances are strong and fearless all round, with Bell's unanchored angst being particularly moving. Impressive, too, is the coolly manipulative calmness that suddenly switches on in McElhinney when she moves into her secondary role as Anne's psychiatrist.

Once you've been hooked on the lean tension in Dreams in White, there is a brutal, unreserved payoff. Director Tanya Goldberg (The Story of Mary MacLane By Herself, Way to Heaven) has chosen to go all-out on the ending, which is confronting in the intimate confines of the Stables Theatre and saddening in the context of the characters you thought you knew.

Image by Brett Boardman.