There have been endless coming out stories in the last few years across theatre and television.
How can another one stand out? Is it a timeless narrative forever valid to audiences or a tired trope with more vital terrain of the queer experience left to explore?
This Genuine Moment, presented La Mama and Rock Bottom Productions as part of Midsumma Festival, doesn’t ask this. Instead, it looks to the periphery, gazing toward the reciprocal act of opening up and listening.
Riley (Tom Dawson) and Louis (Ilai Swindells) wake up in bed together on Christmas Eve after drunkenly meeting the night before. For the remainder of the show, the stranger-lovers chat in Riley’s bedroom about their lives, flaying their bodies across his mattress this way or that.
Their conversation is dorky yet fluid with Jacob Parker’s writing bringing a gentle touch carried with monumental effort by the two leads. With their quiet pillow-talk, Riley and Louis connect via raw stories filled with cynicism and hope about their histories and futures. They listen to each other.
The production floats, swaying above deep waters. The pair’s dialogue naturally ebbs and flows with little else plot-wise happening, sans checking their phones. This one-scene approach, while ambitious, lacks oomph.
Are the characters groggy from their night out, are the actors emulating a shyness between two strangers attempting intimate conversation? It’s unclear whether this slowness is deliberate or what the intent is, if there is one.
The result is a humdrum, steady tension building a loose, dreamy mood. Their playful quiffs hover above substance, more serious notes don’t say anything new, but then something sensitive will slip.
Even so, there’s not always a commitment to launch entirely into a ‘big topic’ or tap into its gravitas. But such is the way of wandering conversations in real life.
This Genuine Moment takes current halfway
through, with its comfortable approach bearing fruit to the universality of its
themes. The production embeds a homely, safe calm through a tactile quality as
the actors touch and tug soft fabrics – undies, socks, hoodies, sheets. Riley
and Louis are strangers to each other but not to the audience. The bedroom set,
the young queer characters and their sticky feelings are so familiar.
With this intimacy, Riley and Louis’ twilight moment between
night and day in the private bedroom releases the pressures of time and place.
Such stillness gives room to remarkable character development. Within this
frozen time, Dawson and Swindells’ portrayal of their characters’ vulnerability
exposes contrasts that could have been lost in a busier play: rejection and
embrace, pain and joy, honesty and protection.
In this, This Genuine Moment might not be as simple as it seems: with fear of humiliation, queer identity is underpinned by caution. Their tempered confessions speak widely to the anxieties of queer self-love and relationships. Such understated purgatory produces a sense of pining in conflict with the production’s familiarity and ease. With this craving, This Genuine Moment pulls you in the orbit of Riley and Louis’ conversation as they take clumsy steps to embrace emotional transparency with themselves and others.
Theatre review: This Genuine Moment (La Mama Courthouse).