Paper Crane at the Silo Theatre

By SUSAN BUDD

It is easy to see why Paper Crane won the Playwrights' Association of New Zealand's Minolta playwriting competition for Rita Stone, who also directed this production.

The play is tightly structured around a plot of twists and turns, the well-contrasted characters have depth and complexity, and their dialogue is crisp and convincing.

On a stage bare but for a bed and two chairs, Libby, Simon and Jamie trace the tangled web of their lives. Libby's life whizzes like a Catherine wheel.

Libby, played with a fine blend of anxiety and serious girlishness by Rachael d'Aguiar, has dumped art student Jamie after discovering him in a compromising situation with an artists' model, and found what she considers to be a more stable substitute in Simon, gung-ho gymnast and devotee of self-improvement books.

The two men could not be more different.

Barefoot Jamie, given confused vulnerability and messy charm by Jarrod Martin, is a guy with good intentions who fails miserably in performance, while Simon is a control freak with a dangerously short fuse. Phil Brown gives a strong comic performance that contains more than a hint of threat.

Libby is caught between a rock and a hard place as each uses her as co-star in his life story.

Stone's message - that we all have our own stories and are not just bit players in the lives of others - is reinforced as the characters engage in a series of monologues and only occasionally actually communicate.

But her achievement lies not just in the unsparing depiction of the trio's flaws, but in the generosity of her characterisation, so that no one - not even bully Simon - quite loses the sympathy of the audience.