Concrete Playground

Theatres in Sydney over the last 12 months have been brimming with anti-epic domestic snapshots of fraught intimate relationships, and the latest from UK physical theatre company Frantic Assembly continues the trend.

Todd and Kali are despicable human beings. They never leave each other’s side, love IKEA, brag about their beautifully equipped kitchen and say things like "fuck off Ingmar Bergman you are so fucking talented" after watching The Seventh Seal. They will disgust you on multiple levels.

The play on ‘Stockholm’ — being both the yuppie couple’s syndrome and dream getaway destination — is excessively literal, and the script is ultimately unambitious in its breadth and depth.

The performances are strong, with Leeanna Walsman coming off brilliantly as the obsessive, vulnerable and sensual jealous lover. However, she and her co-performer Socratis Otto are clearly not dancers, and the movement sequences work with mixed success. The climactic fight scene is both highly charged and graceful while the bedroom make-up sequence is almost unbearably clumsy.

This is a contained and consistently tense production, a highlight being the live aroma of chopped onion cooking in butter on stage — here’s to theatre exploiting its olfactory capacities more often.

Image by Brett Boardman.