'The Play About The Baby' at the Herald Theatre

BY FRANCIS TILL

THE HERALD THEATRE, Auckland - Perfectly reasonable people who relish theatre often hate The Play About The Baby - it is not a work for lovers of the everyday or those impatient for plot.

A biting, absurdist chamber comedy that finishes up on provocatively ambiguous points, Baby gets top marks from the rest, however.

On a poetically spare set, the action involves only a cast of two beautiful, frequently nude, naive lovers (Boy and Girl), two elegant, older demiurges drenched in vaudevillian urbanity (Man and Woman), and a baby the audience confronts only as a bundle of cloth after hearing its almost trivial birth offstage.

Boy (Michael Hallows) and Girl (Jennifer Freed) are kept inside the fourth wall, but Man (Jonathan Hardy) and Woman (Elizabeth Hawthorne) engage the audience at will. It's an old ruse, but effective in setting allegorical identities. Baby occupies a third space, indistinct but pervasive.

After a masque rife with dazzling patter and sexual preening, Baby is "taken away" by Man and Woman and made to vanish. The serpentine duo then convince the shattered naifs to "admit" the birth had never happened, and so to exit Eden into fully human lives.

We are examining illusion and delusion here, and the manageable limits of pain. We are shown the uses of mind and memory in their navigation. But what are we really looking at?

The author has said that the baby is real, although everything "real" is "really" something quite different, even to the extent of being a metaphor for itself.

This use of artificial characters and self-referential language to make enigmatic points is risky business. Most audiences can only be cajoled into going along on such a ride by profoundly captivating performances.

Hawthorne and especially Hardy give them. Freed and especially Hallows do not.

Admittedly, Boy and Girl are intentionally callow, one-dimensional characters. Still, we should be helped to care about their pain when it matters. Hallows and Freed are nearly automata in performances that work against that end, except in glimpses. Director Simon Prast might shine a little more light on their interiors.