Review by Anja Bless
Described as “Beckett meets Black Mirror”, Arlington is making its Australian debut at Seymour Centre in Sydney. Written by the award-winning writer of Once, Enda Walsh, Arlington explores the inherent need and desire for human connection in a world of increasing isolation.
The story centres around Isla (Phaedra Nicolaidis), a woman who has spent most of her life in a place many of us dread – an anonymous waiting room, hoping for the day that her number will be called. Her only companion is the man who records her stories and memories, and watches her movements, on the other side of the wall. When he is unexpectedly replaced by a bumbling young man (Jack Angwin), a tender connection is borne via the speaker system.
Set in a dystopian world where humans wait in towers to be ‘called’ to their next fate, Walsh’s Arlington is perhaps more Orwellian than Beckett, as two souls battle against the oppressive controlling state. Nicolaidis and Angwin bring a wonderful chemistry to their performance, their quips and awkward exchanges drawing chuckles from the audience. Nicolaidis captures the childlike innocence of Isla perfectly, and Angwin gives the right blend of nervous intern and rebellious spirit to his character. The set and costume design by Kate Beere, complemented so well by lighting and video design by Aron Murray, help to evoke both the blandness of a waiting room, and the beauty of life and the transition of time.
Unfortunately, Walsh’s script gives only around a third of the stage time to the interaction between Angwin and Nicolaidis’ characters. Just enough for the audience to understand some of their background and to develop an interest in their tale, before the set and scene is changed. Here, the tone and style of Arlington transforms substantially, with a contemporary dance and movement performance by Emma Harrison of another woman stuck inside another waiting room. While both beautiful and painful in its artistry, this section is almost a third of the play’s duration. The audience’s attention begins to lapse in the repetitive motions, often without accompanying music or sound, which aptly tell of the frustration from endless waiting but also lead the audience to share this sense of boredom after a time. While this is perhaps the intention of Walsh/Harrison as a performance art piece, the length of this section detracts from its impact, especially in contrast with the dynamism of Angwin and Nicolaidis’ performances.
What then follows this scene is the return of Angwin, now trapped in the room himself, and being interrogated by an unnamed representative of the ‘tower’ (Georgina Symes). While again the performances in this scene are powerful, by this stage not enough context has been given to the audience to fully grasp the world in which these interactions are taking place. Walsh’s script leaves too much unsaid or implied, and it is unclear why the towers were ever built in the first place, only that it was, and is, ‘terrible’. The dialogue switches between realist to poetry in a way that becomes disjointed, and too much is left unsaid to make sense of it all. This sense of unevenness was further exacerbated by the sound design, which was at times unbearably loud and had a number of jerky transitions.
These things unfortunately undermined the potential of what could be a powerful and moving piece. In its attempts to merge theatre and art, Arlington seems to have lost the necessary elements of engaging storytelling.
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