Review: kerosene & SIRENS
Benjamin Nichol, with Izabella Yena & Olivia Satchell | fortyfivedownstairs, Wurundjeri Country | 08/2023.
I wake up alone in my bed / There’s nothing before my eyes / And outside the door / Only the sighing / And you out there in a gathering storm
Benjamin Nichol is an unusual talent.
Nichol and I are similar ages, but when I watch his work I am surprised by this fact. He wears so many hats with such elan that I am convinced he lives a secret second life — a life where he writes, acts, directs (and sings) without fatigue. To be truly good at just one of these pursuits would be impressive yet here we have Nichol: a creature of multiple, significant gifts.
The scope and scale of Nichol’s talents are on display in his new double bill, featuring kerosene (2021, co-directed with Izabella Yena) and SIRENS (2022, co-created with Yena and co-directed with Olivia Satchell).
The elemental quality of the two pieces is underscored by their double-billing: kerosene the lower-case flame to SIRENS’ all-caps flood.
Both works appeal to the power of nature — human and environmental — and Nichol’s contrasting of fire and water facilitates a meditation on emotion; parallels between the elements and the id as two characters reconcile desire with their sense of place and family.
First, I should acknowledge my relative inexperience with criticising theatre. I have not ‘reviewed’ theatre since my Year 13 drama exams (shout out to the Janet Frame mythology Gifted by Patrick Evans).
Theatre is not my area of expertise and I would hate to masquerade as an authority. My philosophy as a dance critic, for example, is that art demands and deserves the insights developed by practising in the area one reviews; a familiarity with the form granted through what some have called ‘know-how.’ This is not to preclude the criticism of those who review outside their area of practice — criticism is a ‘long-dying’ area of public writing that would benefit from more voices, not less — but rather to encourage a mutual intimacy between thought and practice.
However, it is a testament to the faculty of Nichol and his team that any of us might feel equipped, if not compelled, to comment on his work.
The evening begins with kerosene. We open and close with the daydreaming figure of Millie, played with incandescent intensity by Yena. Millie lives in Lilydale with her friend-cum-idol Annie, and the work traces the waxing and waning of their relationship with one another.
As someone with a near-comic habit of falling in love with his friends, Millie’s is a familiar story to me. Nichol and Yena have done well to capture the overly earnest pining and romanticisation of childhood friendship, and the ways this can transform into repressed, confusing adult love.
Annie, according to Millie, is a True Blue peroxide beauty of confidence and charisma. However, when Annie meets the abusive Trent, Millie becomes isolated. The rage that transpires is poignant, though the fixation — benign and otherwise — that underscores Yena’s Millie is even more powerful.
In pursuit of Millie’s complex devotion to Annie, Yena’s physicality is impressive. She wields her jawbone like a wand and hides her character’s anxiety behind lifted-chin machismo. Her arms melt from her shoulders like wax, evoking adolescent inertia. Her chest shines and her sternum lifts with each thought of Annie and her weight shifts with the audience’s understanding of her devotion. She barks and belts through Nichol’s characteristically clipped text — short, rapid phrasings that bite the air. Yena has grown further into the pacing of this role since 2021, and we benefit from a more confident embodiment.
To that point, embodiment and the body are significant themes in kerosene. The opening salvo of poolside period blood, wiry pubic hair and brassy farts grounds the work in bodily shame. Though Yena’s pubescent lead eventually grows into adulthood, she doesn’t escape the creep of bodily change: sudden mood swings, futile dates and an absent sex life, nor the tenderness she shows Annie when massaging her ear in bed.
To this end, Millie’s sexuality (which Nichol leaves un-stated) serves as the secondary protagonist in the work. Millie’s latent queerness, wherein the platonic is muddied with the Platonic Ideal of Annie, speaks to the unspoken, and by extension obsessive qualities of love. Millie’s hope that despite their ever-shifting estrangement Annie and her might be reunited is wrought tragic by this writing from Nichol — a strong counter to the melodramatic tendencies that can colour solo shows.
Nichol is preoccupied with place in both pieces in this double bill. Coober Pedy, the birthplace of Millie’s grandfather in kerosene, is “a cruel place for cruel people.” The Otway-esque skyline of SIRENS is marked by servos, church spires and sun-faded Christmas wreathes on Main Street. We assume that Nichol’s character in SIRENS, Eden, is named for the Biblical garden.
Nichol’s attention is fixed on the suburban and semi-rural experience, then: working class ‘paradises’ of asphalt and heavy skies.
Harrie Hogan’s lighting design provides subtle scenery and contrast to this end; augmenting the minimalist aesthetic of both pieces. As single-handers, both kerosene and SIRENS benefit from Hogan’s touch. Indeed, and although I am inclined to wonder how both works would read with a compact, naturalistic set, the lighting allows for a more dream-like appreciation of the spartan staging. Connor Ross on sound design is equally commendable and his deft touch is appreciated — the faint echoes of a phone beeping and fire crackling add without intruding.
This ‘gravity’ of place as created through light and sound is especially important in SIRENS.
The second act of Nichol’s double bill follows a young gay man named Eden whose tryst with David, an out-of-town drag queen, inspires dreams of San Francisco and a future over the horizon.
Eden’s gooning horniness is reminiscent of my own coastal-town summers, where the heat puts you in heat and you lose your gay little mind. He eagerly flicks his finger down to refresh his Grindr grid, hoping that the holidays will herald new faces and headless torsos.
Eden’s encounters with men are functional — recounted with the kind of measured pride that minimises secret dissatisfaction. Ostensibly a bottom (content warning for Troye Sivan) it’s not until David and Eden sleep together that Eden realises sex doesn’t have to hurt. His previous hook-ups with anonymous men in cramped cars and truck stop stalls fall away with David, whose green-nailed hands gently caress Eden; whose strong arms hold him afloat in the surf and drape around him while lying in a hammock.
In another life, Nichol might have been a dancer. Like a lava lamp, his Eden gyrates and bounces, hips undulating and spine like a snake-wrapped tree. As a study of working-class self-consciousness, Nichol excels in the use of his hands, with fidgeting fingers thumbing at his board-short waistband and index fingers readily pointing out landmarks and local idiots alike.
Nichol is captivating, and draws tears to my eyes as he spits and sinks into the third act — he himself a siren for the many ‘what could have been’ loves of queer youth. His performance is one of total, terrifying commitment.
At the outset of this review, I included some Paul Kelly lyrics and did so with good reason.
Although I grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand my Dad would often play classics of Australian folk-rock for my siblings and me, including the likes of Kelly, Hunters & Collectors, and Weddings, Parties, Anything.
Kelly’s music is deeply nostalgic for me. It reminds me of my childhood in a former state-house, where patches of wallpaper were torn from the beige walls and the rimu floors pock-marked with borer holes. His music reminds me of dead grass, white frosts, and my first sip of home-brewed beer; eating apricot chicken for dinner as the stereo slammed our lapsed-Catholic ears.
Nichol’s writing has the same effect on me.
His talents, as noted, are myriad, but his truest skill is conjuring familiarity: dysfunctional families, lost loves, and post-industrial melancholy. He is an emerging master of small-town grief and heartache — a rare practitioner in the queer scene who attends to that seemingly forbidden word: class.
Too often queer narratives, implicit or explicit, suggest that family is an inevitable casualty of queer self-actualisation and that our roots must be discarded in the name of (bourgeois) emancipation. Though queerness’ relationship to the nuclear family as a symbol of the working class is fraught, the idea that urban diaspora is fundamental to queer identity is equally tenuous. Nichol looks to those ‘left behind’ and agitates our assumptions of queer escape: following your heart out of Ringwood is easier said than done.
With his collaborators in tow, Nichol brings us to the edge of the gathering storm. For those seeking insight into the tension between desire and place, this double bill is moody, moving, and exemplary. ▮
