Sweet Nothings at ATYP - Review

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Thu 07 Nov 2013 - Sat 23 Nov 2013

Sweet Nothings, a play written by David Harrower , is an adaptation of an 1895 play named Liebelei, written by Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler . It has since made its Australian debut at the Australian Theatre for Young People, with a run that started on the 7th November.



In a nutshell, the play follows a young couple, Fritz ( Graeme McRae ) and Christine ( Matilda Ridgway ) , and their blossoming romance, with their friends Theodore ( Owen Little) and Mizi ( Clementine Mills ) helping things along. Or are they? Fritz and Theodore, as lifelong chums, appear to have more on their minds than relationships, and Mizi is non-plussed by Christine's naive declarations of love.

If you knew nothing about this play beforehand (which I didn't), and the only knowledge you had of the storyline and themes came from the booklet you read prior to the performance (which I had read), then Act 1 would have have left you feeling a little lost (which is how I felt). It was like a depiction of a less-impressive party that Jay Gatsby may have thrown, had he lived in Vienna, Austria, where the story is set. Did the opening act make me want to find out more about the characters? Yes it did, if only because I still had no idea what was going on.

A short interval followed the first act and it was here that I was left pondering everything else I had come away with in Act I. The set design and props, although overall had nothing wrong with them, looked too modern for 1800s Vienna. I tried to convince myself that the play was set in modern times, but the characters kept making references to a way of life not found today. The casts' costumes also threw me a little. You can't fool me, I've seen those men's skinny jeans on many a hipster, but what was with the old-fashioned soldier's jacket on stage? I understand that the play was not a period piece. Now. I understand now. At the time of the performance, however, not so much.

Act II introduced new characters, a meddling neighbour-type woman (Katharina, played by Lucy Miler ) and Christine's loving father (Weiring, played by Mark Lee ), and it's only here that I begin to settle into the performance (although Mizi's flirtatious antics and Christine's charming innocence in Act I were fine). It was also here that I began to get a sense of the world that Christine lives in, not just a different time, but a totally different world, where men and women interacted and behaved in a way we are supposed to find unfamiliar.

But despite the "what the hell timeframe is this play set in?" feeling running through my head throughout the evening, the universal themes of love, relationships and sex still shone through, and it will resonate with everyone. A woman might relate to Ridgway's Christine and understand her feelings of love for Fritz, like a teenager in love for the first time, and that same woman will look at Mill's portrayal of Mizi and cheer her for being the seemingly more independent of the two. The character of Mizi also raised the question of whether her flirtatious nature was genuine or just bravado - could she allow herself to be as lovesick as Christine?

Act III, in as much as Act II made you finally care for the characters, made you want to throw your hands up in the air and yell, "Why! Why are you being so hopeless!". If a character like Christine was around today, in the age that brought us Sex and the City and Girls, then Christine would be the Charlotte/Shoshanna character at her weakest.

Sweet Nothings, all in all, was a strange play to watch. I wanted so much for the female characters to snap out of it, carry on, be strong, but perhaps the script didn't allow for it? It will leave you pondering a lot more than just whether men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

Sweet Nothings runs untill 23rd November at the ATYP, Sydney.

Tickets:
$32.50 Full, $25 Concession $25 group 4 , $20 preview
Bookings:
Call atyp on (02) 9270 2400 or book online
Sweet Nothings Trailer from pantsguys Productions on Vimeo.

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!date 07/11/2013 -- 23/11/2013
%wnsydney