Writer and Director: Si Rawlinson
Combining drama and dance, Si Rawlinson’s new production for Kakilang is an office-based story about colleague conflict, the pressures of workplace change and the personal sacrifices its four individuals make for their jobs. Performed at The Place and co-produced by Curve Theatre, Saving Face is an often-puzzling experience in which moments of expressive dance are muted by a conventional script and elongated storytelling. Advertised as 60 minutes but running for 80, Rawlinson’s over-written piece would benefit from less dialogue and more movement.
Manager Lesley is working her team hard with an impending restructure and likely cuts meaning someone’s job is on the line. But over several days as the intensity builds, Lesley’s abrupt style brings her into conflict with Sam, Drew and Jackie who resent her approach and the office starts to fall apart. With each person neglecting someone at home, an important presentation will determine all of their fates.
Saving Face is at its best when dance and music are given precedence in the story. Each character is assigned a motif early on, a piece that draws them out of their mundane role and into a fantasy world where their expressive and distinctive inner lives are allowed to emerge. Sam is exhausted and becomes swept up in narcoleptic clowning – almost certainly a new genre – as the routines of the workplace occur around him in a sequence involving plenty of box files and lots of skilful falling down. Jackie is in love with someone about to leave for 6 months and bursts into a jazzy performance, swept up in the perfect contentment she feels and plans for a happy future, while Drew is constantly interrupted by phone calls from his father to a That’s Life ringtone.
The dance styles are broad-ranging, bringing together hip-hop and break dance as well as jive and contemporary. Performed by Rawlinson, Yukiko Masui, Jamaal O’Driscoll (with a leg brace) and Lisa Chearles there is fluidity and meaning in the movements that show the emotional struggles that individuals contain beneath the surface of everyday life among people they only know because of their jobs. Visually, too, designer Christine Ting – Huan 挺歡 Urquhart suggests that very mundanity in a grey and white space, but with wheely desks and chairs there is also free-flowing re-arrangement throughout as the office reconfigures itself with ease.
Yet Rawlinson’s uneven story struggles to sustain itself as the overarching driver – discovering the outcomes of the restructure – becomes flattened and lost in stunted romances, resentful late working, repeated examples of bad management and a lack of narrative purpose. There is a slow loss of control across the several days in which this story takes place, but Saving Face never really gets inside the characters to understand what is really at stake for them, whether they care about their job or what their relationships with each other really mean.
With a greater emphasis on dance, there is a more pointed 60-minute show in here focused on the job threat and the paranoia, suspicion and competition it generates among the staff members. And while there are many inventive ways to bring words and movement together in theatre, the dance here could take greater precedence.
Runs until 24 June 2023
The Reviews Hub Score:
Puzzling
