Ripping. By Dale Stam. Directed by Hannah Miller. Lexx Productions. Belconnen Theatre until December 19 at 7.30pm, with 2pm matinee on December 19. Bookings: lexxproductions.com.au.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
It is very necessary that there be groups like Lexx Productions around prepared to have a go at new work.
Dale Stam's Ripping is a short new piece that plays with the story of Jack the Ripper and the politics of a university club devoted to theories about the famous killer's identity. There is a sense in which the past invades the campus of the present as students keep vanishing and the campus and the pub in which the club's meeting is taking place go into lockdown.
A journalism student has inveigled her way into the club to see if there is a connection between student disappearances and what goes on at the pub where they meet. However, the members are too involved in their own Ripper theories to do much more than give her a bad time as a newcomer who needs initiating.
This has the potential to be as daft and as frightening and as clever as an episode of Sherlock, but it never really figures out what it wants to do. It needs a certain skill to write something that accommodates tragedy, comedy and horror.
The characters talk and act out their versions of the Ripper story. Was it a member of the royal family? Was it a midwife? Was it a fishmonger? The increasingly reluctant journalism student is given an increasingly difficult time. And then the lockdown happens and the club members themselves start to vanish.
Perhaps the true horror may be a murderer who is no one in particular and therefore could be anyone, but this production remains short on the necessary build-up of tension and atmosphere. The Belconnen Theatre has its limitations, but sound and lighting could be made to do more to support the potentially dark nature of the piece. And breaking such a short play in the middle lets the audience off the hook.
Despite energetic and promising work from some of the cast, the characters remain limited in dimension. Those limitations are to some extent in the writing and in the genre. But it is hard to warm to any of these people, their relationship to each other or the terror that is supposed to be lurking outside the pub.
The mystery of Jack the Ripper has potency as have the tropes of the horror film. It's well-worked-over territory but that does not mean it can't be made to work. A tighter ensemble and a more ruthless approach to direction and style might move this piece on.
