Karma Kafe
Written by Carl Caulfield, produced by Stray Dogs Theatre Company
Playhouse Theatre, Newcastle. Tickets from $39 are available online.
If you have worked in hospitality or known someone who has, you know its undercurrent of continuity. There is no beginning, and there is no end. Customers come and go on the ebb and current of the day or night, sometimes flashing briefly, sometimes brightly, sometimes in a slow and regular burn, and in that steady current, there is always something to do. Tables need clearing, the coffee machine needs cleaning, the cutlery needs polishing, and at the end, the stage is reset for the next service, and the current comes around again and again.
At some fundamental level, this Sisyphean scene is held up by the chairs and tables that are rhythmically shifted, up-ended, arranged and re-arranged in endless maintenance according to the flow of strangers swirling around each other's individual lives, sharing only the space for as long as they are in it. It's a crossroads - an intersection of incongruous lives and stories intertwining but never touching, clashing but rarely connecting.
It's fitting, then, that Carl Caulfield's latest stage production, set in a fictional Newcastle cafe, seems to start before the audience is even in their seats. As the crowd mingled from the bar into the close air of the Playhouse theatre on Thursday night, the Karma Kafe's barista, Judd, played by Nathan Faulkner, was already tinkering around the machine and going through the pre-service motions. The waitress, Milly (Fiona Collins), was busy wiping tables and scribbling on the specials board. The opera-singing Scottish chef, Billy (James Walker), arrives and crosses the stage as the audience bustles for their assigned seats on what feels like a well-worn track to the back-of-house kitchen.
There is no beginning.
So the titular Darby Street 'Kafe' opens for service on another non-descript morning, and the production rolls into life over a cleverly blurred and unstated starting line. The cast is introduced, in turn, from the aforementioned "barista with a beard", under the management of the spiritually in-tune owner Rewa (Jessie Allan-Berry), to a colourful cast of regulars who wander into the scene.
Caulfield based his fictional cafe on Goldbergs - Newcastle's long-running cosmopolitan coffee institution - and said he wrote most of the script there, taking inspiration from the mosaic of customers and staff that filter through its doors.
The cast is certainly eclectic, with a rag-tag band of familiars well-suited to the scene - like any crowded cafe, we know none of these people, but somehow we know them all too well.
From the wistfully creative writer (self-insert) scribbling away on his novel, desperately in love with the ingenue waitress but unable to express it except through ordering smashed avo on toast, to the loveable mute (mostly) vagabond Bongo Jo who is as much a part of the scene as the scenery, to the ambitious if misguided "entrepreneur" (using the apostrophes carefully) building his vague start-up from the cafe - they're all here in this writerly love letter to that universal hobby of writers: people-watching.
Both production and cast hit all the Novocastrian beats: Greedy developers are looking to turn the beloved local Kafe (said to have roots as deep as Laman Street figs, the mention of which elicited the obligatory audible groan from the capacity crowd) into a gauche multiplex, unchallenged by weak and complicit politicians who want to build the "New, new Newy" with open disregard for community nostalgia. Even the Herald gets a mention as the scrappy staff of the Karma Kafe and their band of all-too-local regulars stage a last stand to save their beloved watering hole in this musical tale of Novocastrian wish fulfilment, in which the power of community finally defeats the relentless march of (alleged) progress in the city.
But while the dominoes are dutifully stood on their ends in the first act, with fruitful avenues to explore in this rich landscape of vignettes, Caulfield's characters struggle to develop much depth beyond their opening numbers, as the scene sometimes fumbles its ambitiously sprawling undertaking and drifts from Novocastrian to Novo-caricature.
Similarly, the cast of local acting talent admirably takes up the yoke of a script that, at times, seems to struggle with deciding what it is (a musical, a comedy, a Novo-morality tale, a character study, a comment on the state of the city or a cartoon of it), but lose their opportunity to put significant meat on the bones of their characters in the milieu, lending the scene an unfortunate tendency to feel overcrowded and busy.
There is a sense, here, of a child in a ball pit, picking up balls with loving ambition but dropping them just as often in the rush to hold and carry the entire pit at once. It is likely an ironically unintentional effect that this quality is a somewhat faithful representation of the hospitality scene generally - that people come and go, often forgettably, as service carries endlessly on.
Still, every one of the characters on stage has boundless potential and interest, from the suspicious, nosy, iPhone-recording and athleisured dog-mum Brenda (Kerrie Stephens), who seems to trust only her beloved pet Banjo (Rex) to Rory Pollock's entrepreneurial Matthew Maloney struggling to get his start-up off the ground and step out of the shadow of his doting if helicoptering mother Agnes (played by Felicity Biggins).
The script is fit to bursting with potential, and perhaps the most genuinely enjoyable aspect of the show is the cast's eager enthusiasm and excitement to lean into the ambition and take big swings, an ethos embodied the most by Angela Robertson's perpetually on-stage vagabond, Bongo Jo - the mute homeless observer of the scene, filling the role of the audience surrogate - endowed with a Memory-level aria in the middle of the show spinning the tale of how she fell on hard times.
It's a big, unapologetic, Webber-esque number that Robertson wrestles with wholeheartedly in her Grizabella rags.
Both in script and production, this is a show that - as the adage goes - shoots for the moon if only to land somewhere among the stars.
Still, the misfortune is that landing among those stars often comes at the expense of the characters' and players' real chance to develop, change and shine.
Faulkner's barista, Judd, is perhaps the most unfortunate victim of the script's busyness and, through no fault of his talent, fades into the background soon after his first number. It's telling that his solo takes a cheeky dig at the ubiquitous "barista with a beard", so proud of his various "diplomas", only for him to be referred to by the same anonymous moniker for most of the remaining show.
Like the shelf of knick-nacks above his coffee machine (from behind which, he sometimes struggles to escape), the play seems to be constantly accumulating new and shiny additions, if only for them to then be quickly relegated to the background to gather dust.
Judd never quite becomes anything more than another barista with a beard. The writer, Jim, never overcomes his awkward inability to profess his love for Milly (the subject of his only solo song). Rewa never has to really confront her brutally optimistic spiritualism that dictates that, in hard times, the universe will provide (in fact, it does in the end), and Brenda never really has to confront the suspiciousness and cynicism that isolates her from her community (in fact, she's rewarded for it). The developer never falls in love with Newcastle (but on that note, at least, are any of us surprised?). And Bongo Jo sadly never seizes enough agency to escape the scenery and become part of the scene.
Against the unsteady hurly-burly of one-note Johnny-come-lately characters, the clever locals-only references lose some of their deserved lustre and, without the confidence of a structured story arc around them, start to drift towards a litany of pandering gags.
It's never more evident than in the final scenes when the script seems to devolve into a series of long monologues delivered directly through a suddenly shattered fourth wall, first by the local police officer in a diatribe about the apparently inherent corruption of NSW greasing the wheels of "progress" and then by the literal deus ex machina of a wealthy older resident (arriving hot on the heels of the jarringly overt line "haven't you ever heard of a deus ex machina?") who swoops in to buy the Karma Kafe out from under the (literally) predatory developer and even knock down the rent for good measure.
Thus, the story comes full circle from the equally on-the-nose prop of a battered old typewriter introduced in the first scene with the Kafe-owner Rewa's line "I just love old things", promptly added to the shelf and forgotten about for the remainder of the story.
John Murphy as the young writer; James Walker, the chef; and Fiona Collins, the waitress, feel most at ease in their roles and shine throughout the production.
Biggins equally shows a masterclass of vanishing into her character of Agnes Maloney, and Faulkner's confidence on stage battles bravely to overcome the on-paper cookie-cutter limitations of his role. Given the lofty heights reached for in this singing-dancing-acting-extravaganza, the cast goes to great and admirable lengths to carry the production.
If Caulfield's people-watching meditation on the city's cafe culture was intended as a sprawling opus that speaks to and satirises the bigger identity of Newcastle, then on that score, the script sadly misses its moon. In place of a more sophisticated piece of writing that speaks to the nuance and complexity of the local culture, a script that lovingly tries to capture everything everywhere all at once runs the risk of losing its deserved impact.
But, the play nevertheless lands endearingly (if a little wonkily) among the writer's earlier starry works as a light, fun, frivolous and quirky production that cheekily winks (or rather, blinks hard with both eyes and an exaggerated and overt full-face scrunch) at the city's (many - Herald included) foibles.
The show, produced by Stray Dogs Theatre Company and presented by UpStage at the Playhouse, with a local cast of 13 and a five-piece live band, opened on October 3 and closes on Saturday, October 12. Tickets are available online.
