Cosi
By Louis Nowra
Directed by Adam Cook
Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney
Reviewed by Tracy Sorensen and Angela Matheson
How could you go wrong? Louis Nowra breathes new life into that now thoroughly worked-over period in Australian history - the Vietnam Moratorium days - when today's well-known playwrights and directors were young.
Cosi is set in a grungy student household - complete with beret- wearing Maoists, a burnt cat and exploding beer bottles - and in a psychiatric institution where the inmates insist on staging Mozart's opera, Cosi Fan Tutti.
When a play comes together as easily as this - warm, unsentimental and funny - you realise there's more to this production than simply tapping into '60s nostalgia. Director Adam Cook hooks into Nowra's humane instincts and gives us a production which brings out the best in both the play and the actors.
The escalating exuberance as student director, Lewis, played by Ben Mendelsohn, deals with the psychiatric peculiarities of his cast as they battle it out to get their opera up amidst arson attacks and their inability to sing or speak Italian, is beautifully timed. The acting, right down to the ever-twitching kneecap of flick-knife wielding Cherie, played by Celia Ireland, is superb.
If the beret-wearing revolutionary/student director who becomes a Labor MP is cliched (this bit, explains Nowra, is based on real life), and if 20 years of feminism have made Woman's Constancy (the subject of this play and Cosi Fan Tutti) an un-gripping theme, these are small glitches indeed.
Indeed, the production is reliant on well-worn ideas for its success - the play within a play, the cliche of the female actors falling in love with the director who understands them, the insight that sanity and madness are not necessarily opposites. All these are theatrical conventions which the cast gleefully play with as they send up the obsessions and ego battles of the Australian theatre industry.
Nowra's play is based on his experience directing a group of psychiatric patients in a production of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Trial by Jury which, in the end, included numbers by the Bee Gees and Henry Mancini. As in Cosi, the shyer cast members blossomed on the night.
Says Nowra: "Cosi is faintly based on that production and is a mixture of autobiography, fictions and lies, and like the actual events of those days is, I hope, full of comedy and affection. Real madness and angst only occurred when I worked with professional actors." Cook's Cosi is one of those rare productions which gives you a night out at the theatre blissfully free of pretension.