The Garage International @ Adelaide Town Hall – Tue 25 Feb
 
AJAR situates itself in the mundane to explore our contemporary moment’s inherent disenchantment and despair. Written by local poet Tom Gurn and directed by Charlie Barwa, the piece largely takes the form of a real time conversation between two sisters in one living room. The stripped back set might at first suggest a scene of pleasant domesticity, but the banal surrounds are quickly revealed to harbour profound existential discontents.
 
The play’s protagonist Sophie (Amy Hefferman) fixates on language – she wonders about the word “unadulterated”, and if it is possible to return to the “unadulterated” and inherently awed state of her sister Ali‘s (Nina Wilcock) baby daughter, eventually resolving that the only possibility of returning to this uncorrupted state is to “get Alzheimers”. The notion that the tyrannies and tragedies of adult life under capitalism – work without joy or tangible positive impact, human connections dissolved in a collective state of “not enough time”, awe and wonder crushed by the weight of just getting through the day – is what powers and haunts this quietly startling work.
 
Sophie’s flippant remark betrays a person for whom all possibilities of personal satisfaction seem to have been foreclosed upon – at thirty, a career change seems financially impossible with the ever lurking spectre of rent and bills. Ali alternatingly chides and comforts her sister for her lack of gratitude at simply being alive. Sophie admits to contemplating suicide.
 
AJAR offers no solutions to the questions it raises, nor does it suggest that either Sophie or Ali is more correct in their assessment of the state of existence that we find ourselves in. But it does offer certain small enchantments, better left unspoiled – if these are hope enough in a world gone to seed is a question only the individual viewer can answer for themselves.
 
SUMMARY: AJAR situates itself in the mundane to explore our contemporary moment’s inherent disenchantment and despair.