Reviewed by George Niven

Step­ping into the Dome stage at Bats on Tues­day night felt almost like intrud­ing. Tak­ing my seat I felt I was brush­ing past Freya, the char­ac­ter played by writer Tara West­on-Webb, as she sat cross-legged on the floor of her room fas­ti­di­ously paint­ing brightly col­oured icons in a small grid. The approx­im­ately 50 minutes of “Messy”, a new play by West­on-Webb, is set in a single flat bed­room adorned in craf­ted clay mush­rooms and dried orange-slice dream catch­ers that, togeth­er with over-stuffed clothes racks, art­fully invokes a dis­tinctly-inhab­ited private space.

In this semi-bio­graph­ic­al dark-comed­ic work the two main act­ors and co-dir­ect­ors tell a touch­ing story of friend­ship, self-doubt, and strength. On its sur­face, Messy is a play about two flat­mates fig­ur­ing out the “what now?” after art school. Gracie (Cay­la Louise) works the same retail job she has had for years while she looks for her oppor­tun­ity to show her paint­ings. Freya is an acci­dent­al drug deal­er, improb­ably yet pleas­ingly pair­ing her craf­ted mush­room sculp­tures with a “free gift” for those in the know.

The story is told mainly in a series of short con­ver­sa­tions between the two friends in that room, with humour that will sur­prise you and a quick pace to pull you into their rela­tion­ship in the first few minutes. The intel­li­gent, quip­ping dia­logue is some­where between Gilmore Girls and an Aaron Sor­kin series. Most twenty to thirty somethings will recog­nise them­selves or their friends in these char­ac­ters, their rela­tion­ship and exper­i­ences. The audi­ence is a third, silent con­fid­ant in their rhythmic rela­tion­ship.

While the story is told in the one room, fre­quent scene changes keep the nar­rat­ive mov­ing.  Every trans­ition between scenes was accom­pan­ied by a change in cos­tume: Gracie with quick changes in a vari­ety of strik­ing out­fits; Freya chan­ging in front of the audi­ence (it is her bed­room after all) in more subtle steps, as if she spends the whole play get­ting dressed. The con­stant cos­tume and scene changes con­trast with the stat­ic sta­ging to give an impres­sion of the self-crit­ic­al feel­ing famil­i­ar to many includ­ing the char­ac­ters: I’m stuck and everything around me is mov­ing for­ward. Still, des­pite the slick­ness of the scene changes I found myself wish­ing the co-dir­ect­ors had giv­en us more time to linger with the char­ac­ters at the end of some of the more tender scenes.

The two main act­ors and co-dir­ect­ors gave nat­ur­al and com­plete per­form­ances. The phys­ic­al­ity of Louise scream­ing into a pil­low with her whole per­son was par­tic­u­larly mem­or­able, as were Weston-Webb’s slightly sar­cast­ic dir­ect to audi­ence speeches expos­ing her character’s anxi­et­ies. A short appear­ance from Sarah Penny as Annie toward the end of the play gave depth and con­text to the flat­mates’ rela­tion­ship.

“Messy” runs for two more nights at 7pm at Bats and is about 50 minutes long. If you can’t make it, cross your fin­gers for a repris­al in a future fest­iv­al.