A play at the Old 505 Theatre on Eliza Street at #5
O’Connell Town has its own live theatre between King Street and the Camperdown Park. I noticed it on a circuitous path from the gym to our new digs, and found it on the web. I read about ‘Dot Dot Dot’ and we decided to go.
The play is set on the cusp of Federation in late 1900 in Sydney. A serial killer is at work, called Noah because each murder is a pair, two school girls, two merchants, two football players, etc. Two-by-two, Like the Ark before the flood. There is some Victorian spiritualism to confuse matters, a manipulative media mogul (guess who), a spineless political establishment, and much hysteria. The analogies to current events are transparent, but the play is not preachy.
The title ‘Dot Dot Dot’ I took to refer to connecting the dots to figure out what was going on and who was doing it. There is a twist in the tale that I will not spoil.
The staging was spare, toward the Kabuki end of the spectrum of stage craft, and, fittingly, there was some singing, though it is not a musical. Four players suffice. The young man has two roles to fill, as the naif police office and the scion. The older man likewise doubles up as the sage copper and the media mogul. The two women stay in their respective parts as sideshow mystic and woman of the night. The relationship among are tangled, and gradually get untangled through the first long act and the second short act. The direction is crisp, and the players inject conviction and energy in their performances.
Lucy Miller and Matt Bell-King
Niggles, we had a few. Some of the longer speeches were delivered at light speed, and I am sure we missed some relevant things. The shoes worn by the young police officer/scion are currently fashionable with the clown toes, but were not au courant at the fin de siècle in 1900. At one point the mogul says to his son that he will send him to Paris where he ‘can be among his own kind.’ We each independently thought that a reference to homosexuality, but it is not developed and the son seems to have had a sexual liaison with the female mystic. Given the Old 505 Theatre’s association with the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, touted on its web page, the homosexual references is palpable, but irrelevant it seemed. That mystery did not detract from the fun of the show and gave us something to chew on while walking home across the park, where the nocturnal hoons were yet to gather, the pubs had not yet closed and flushed them all out.
Drew Fairley, the writer
The venue is intimate, seating seventy at most; we sat in the back row but were not more than ten meters from the performance area. The front row is on the floor where the performance occurs at one point in a dramatic scene toward the denouement one of the actors, in full oratorical flight, brushed the foot of a spectator in the front row who gave a startled shout that added to the tension of the moment.