night maybe

Kit Brookman’s night maybe, directed by Luke Mullins at Theatre Works for Stuck Pigs Squealing, is a haunting quest through the darkness and dreamscapes that crowd a teenager’s mind.

Sasha (Sarah Ogden) and her brother, Tom (Tom Conroy), are waiting for sundown at the side of a road. Swamped by the growing gloom they appear like child runaways, unsure of where to go now that they’ve left home.

What is clear, as the siblings bicker and snigger over boyfriends and sex, is the sense that they stand on an unstable precipice to adulthood. When Tom suddenly dashes into the darkness, Sasha begins a long journey into a nightscape of alleyways, suburban parks, and the Siberian plains to find him—potentially losing herself in the process.

The world of night maybe is one of dreams, illogic, and shifting selves. The cast (Conroy, with Marcus McKenzie and Brian Lipson) appears as multiple characters in Sasha’s quest—as ghosts, and slippery doubles, and characters split into separate bodies.

Mel Page’s stunning set design represents this interior wilderness of the psyche as a green-grassed woodland, while Richard Fabre’s lighting design bewilders the senses with soupy fog and shifting shadows.

It is this stylistic clarity and the assuredness of director Luke Mullins’ vision that anchors the otherwise disorienting descent into the subconscious, sifting through the various markers of gender, sexuality, and family that form the self.

Stuck Pigs Squealing’s Night Maybe is playing at Theatre Works, St Kilda until 1 September.
For more information and tickets visit: www.theatreworks.org.au.