The River review: Intriguing and intimate story of love and fantasy will only get better

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This was published 7 years ago

The River review: Intriguing and intimate story of love and fantasy will only get better

By Cameron Woodhead
Updated

THEATRETHE RIVER ★★★☆Red Stitch Actors Theatre, St KildaUntil May 28

Watching Jez Butterworth's haunting three-hander, The River, one phrase leaps immediately to mind: "Every love story is a ghost story."

Dawn Fair and Dion Mills in Red Stitch's production of The River.

Dawn Fair and Dion Mills in Red Stitch's production of The River.Credit: Jodie Hutchinson

The line returns like a lost refrain in several books by David Foster Wallace, though Wallace's biographer DT Max hunted down its origins to Australian novelist Christina Stead, from a letter written when she thought, briefly, she might emerge from a profound state of mourning over her dead husband.

Both possibilities – the idealisation and disillusionment of the romance addict, the dissociation of deep grief – hang over this mysterious play. And the paucity of clear evidence in its murky currents leaves open every kind of interpretation, from a probing and poignant meditation on love's transience, to the much darker prospect of a self-deluding lothario, trapped in a Sartrean hell of his own devising.

The premise is disarmingly simple: a man (Dion Mills) courts a woman (Ngaire Dawn Fair) at a log cabin in the wilderness, where he has taken her to engage in what is, to him, the almost spiritual experience of fly fishing. Gentle role playing pervades their encounter: she pretends she has never fished before, to bolster his ego, while he feigns having never brought another woman to this place.

That's a whopper. He has fished here with another woman (Christina O'Neill), possibly many women, and as previous iterations begin to bleed into and eerily shape the present, we are left to question the nature of this one.

The performances are strong, and will only continue to modulate and intensify. Mills' brooding, magnetic masculine presence walks a tightrope between vulnerability and menace. He brings a charisma to the character, yet with all the confidence drained from under it. His spectral portrait is nicely balanced by Fair and O'Neil, both restless, vivid presences as the ones that got away (or did they?).

Perhaps the erotic power could be amped up a little, to give more to be leached into the play's dreamy ebb. Yet John Kachoyan directs sensitively, without fanfare, and a surprising traverse stage, with some ghostly lighting effects, completes this intriguing and intimate dramatic puzzle.

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