The Swimming Lessons at the Silo Theatre

By FRANCIS TILL

SILO THEATRE, Auckland - A completely worthwhile amusement, The Swimming Lessons is the brisk and funny close to the SiLo's trilogy of plays by new Kiwi playwrights, A Hearty Feast.

Lessons' author and lead Jacqueline van Beek is part of what looks to be an emerging "new theatre" family dynasty with close ties to both Bats in Wellington and the SiLo here: sister Paula directs, sister Kathryn writes. Actually, they probably all do everything and, judging only from Jacqueline's work in this production, they probably do it all very well.

Developed much like one of Donald Barthelme's wonderfully allegorical stories of lupine truth layered in ridiculous cloth, Lessons delivers much of its funniest material without even a wink at comic traditions - punchlines can come without setup or warning, delivered so smoothly as to seem almost accidental, and the cast never descends too far into playing directly for laughs.

Without director Emma Willis' unifying hand, though, Lessons might have fallen over into farce - and it would have been much less funny for the fall. Part of that risk comes from van Beek's marvellous sense of physical comedy - her swimming lessons are gems in the genre.

The cast is small but dazzlingly diverse for a story that is essentially only a coming-into-self tale built around a guilt-ridden, bumbling, socially infantile 26-year-old girl, Lizzie - a character Tennessee Williams might have invented for darker ends. There is a fruitarian mother who is fermenting to death (Celia Nicholson), Lizzie's twin sister and antithesis, Ski (Miranda Manasiadis), who has the makings of a young Blanche DuBois in her red dragon dress, and feckless boyfriend, Bret Star (Brett Stewart), who manages to become catalytically snared in the tendrils of a meteorite.

Lessons' characters are more cartoons than caricatures - but cartoons of the sort one finds now in high manga (Japanese cartoon art), rather than American Simple: capable of drawing real breath within refined and highly stylised lines. And while the characters are often engagingly earnest, the play never falls into that trap.