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.