Nil, Cat & Buried is an Australian play by the prolific and award-winning playwright Stephen Sewell. The first production took place at La Mama some fifteen years ago.

This outing is Le Poulet Terrible’s first production of an Australian work, following their stagings of two reasonably well-received European works – Moliere’s The Doctor and Joe Orton’s The Ruffian on the Stair. Three dark, violent stories are told by four actors – one couple and two single characters whose lives do not intersect but mirror each other in their horror and nihilism.

The actors remain on stage with each other for the duration of the performance from their first entrance, creating visually effective tableaux and using the intimate stage space well. This production boasts mainly strong performances (when they don’t tend towards melodrama).

In particular, Natalie Carr’s downtrodden and abused Candy is invested with emotion and pathos that is rarely overplayed. Her chemistry with Daniel Kamouris’ Nick lends a palpable tension to their often angry and violent exchanges. However the subtleties in her performance are often countered by the demands laid on her by the script, which can be about as subtle as a sledgehammer at times.

Richard Cawthorne also falls prey to this problem. His charismatic and very creepy Cat is a highlight for me at the beginning of the show but by the end he has repeated the same refrain about people being essentially corrupt inside so many times that it has lost all impact. Admittedly the extreme heat in the theatre on the night I saw the show probably didn’t help with my patience!

There are very well crafted moments where both the script and the production come together and really work. In these moments the audience is on edge with a palpable discomfort – the narratives include, without giving too much away, domestic violence, adultery, murder, incest and animal torture.

However the power and dramatic tension of these moments is negated by the fact that the writer just doesn’t know when to stop. The script fails to realise when the audience has well and truly “got it” and the dialogue and action goes from being effective to overdone and predictable.

My main problem with this show, as you can probably tell, is the play itself. The director of this production, Alice Bishop, chose to rework the original script and interweave the different characters’ stories. It seems to me that this was a very good choice as the movement between the pieces is well choreographed and the audience doesn’t get bored with any one narrative (or at least as bored as we may have been otherwise!)

This play may have been a bit shocking and disturbing when it was first written fifteen years ago but there is so much of this kind of pseudo-existentialist theatre with nihilistic tendencies and overtones of gender politics out there these days that it just isn’t that interesting anymore.

Call me naïve but it isn’t my experience of life that everyone is horribly cruel to each other all the time and I find it gets a bit tiresome. In saying that, I freely admit that this is a matter of personal taste and regardless of what I thought about the play, Le Poulet Terrible did a fine job with what they had to work with.

I particularly enjoyed the use of simple visual themes such as a light shining out of the surrounding darkness created first by a match, then a lantern and then a torch as each of the characters came on stage. This visual symbol reflected the fact that each character seemed to have very little light inside them and what light was there was being engulfed by the darkness of their situation. This simple symbol of a light could have been continued and repeated even more. I enjoyed the elements of the production that invoked that great tradition of the horror and loneliness of the vast Australian outback - the mound of dirt on stage, Candy’s terror at the noises in the dark when they arrive at an abandoned house, the references to native birds. There were parts that needed work or just didn’t make sense, in particular the way Elizabeth Thompson’s Karen mimed some objects on stage for no apparent reason when other props were physically present and none of the other actors did any miming. However these were generally small issues.

This is an interesting production in the funky, intimate venue The Dog Theatre.

This review was written for www.theatrenetwork.com.au