The drought, the flooding rain, the pushing of 70 dead heifers into a hole: for Ray, a farming man on an unforgiving land, it is what it is. “There’s not much to feel about that,” he tells his wife, Floss, who responds: “I’m feeling plenty, Ray.”
In playwright Angus Cerini’s latest play, Into the Shimmering World, which has premiered at Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1 theatre with Colin Friels as Ray and Kerry Armstrong as Floss, understated emotion must soon give way to the exposure of inner turmoil.
Their exchanges are brief – “OK?”, she asks; “OK”, he replies, though he’s clearly not – and their domestic ritual of putting a kettle on can only soothe so many problems when lifeblood and livelihoods are slipping away. For the climate crisis is wreaking revenge, as much-anticipated rain arrives then just won’t stop, while livestock prices plummet and the future of the farm is on the line.
Into the Shimmering World is the culmination of Cerini’s Australian gothic trilogy, which began boldly with The Bleeding Tree and continued strongly with Wonnangatta, both poetic explorations of unchecked male violence. This time Cerini has in his sights Australian male insecurity, the expression of feelings, some postcolonial soul-searching and global heating.
Into the Shimmering World is briskly paced yet attuned to the script’s rhythms under director Paige Rattray, who oversaw Death of a Salesman for STC in 2021. Arthur Miller’s epic and this new work by Cerini bear comparison, because both are about the great, fabled dreams of their respective nations being wrung out to dry. (Friels has also memorably played Miller’s American everyman Willy Loman, at Belvoir St theatre in 2012.)
Here, Rattray draws from Friels a mesmerising performance as bush man Ray, as the mythologised Australian bucolic ideal is shattered for him. We gain a visceral sense of the harsh realities of rural life – isolation, crippling loss of self-reliance and pride – as Ray confesses his feelings of failure.
Set entirely in the kitchen where Ray and Floss kindle their dreams, the question lingers, as the lighting and sound design set the mood: what is this “shimmering” world of which the play speaks? The sublime, perhaps; the promise of a world beyond pain? A retreat to Eden on denuded land? It is for the audience to decide.
Friels and Armstrong move together and pull apart in a carefully choreographed pas de deux as they speak. The elegant influence of movement director Frances Rings is evident here.
Ray is funny, too, arguing that a Land Cruiser-driving debt collector in his town boots “deserves a single-vehicle rollover”. His envious monologues about a more prosperous neighbour leaven some exquisitely painful moments as Friels writhes in a ballet of agony on the kitchen table. Is he drowning? Howling?
Friels’s Ray is a man whose sons have to squeeze the words “I love you” from their father, as he struggles to grasp why they wish to avoid becoming slaves to the land. Armstrong, meanwhile, is charming as Floss, believable as someone whose love for Ray has survived his many darker moments. The casting is perfect, though I wish we knew a little more of Floss’s inner life.
I also wanted Bruce Spence, playing Ray’s friend Old Mate, to linger a little longer with his funny, contradictory bush philosophy: “Basically you’re done for,” he tells Ray, “but it’s not the end of it.”
This is Ray’s play, however, even as the other characters and components of the piece work so well. Cerini has now delivered us his Australian gothic trilogy, presenting an array of masculine brutality and betterment. The deft poetry and rhythm, accompanied by a dark, dry humour, mark all three works as Australian classics.
Into the Shimmering World plays at Sydney Theatre Ccompany’s Wharf 1 theatre until 19 May
