Concrete Playground

Across the front of a quiet, dark stage, a strip of white. On it balance an ashtray, a cocktail (looking as exactly like a cocktail as one could hope) and a pair of sandals. The scene is set for a lonely holiday, an absurd isolation that is both cruel and ironic. Yet this is only the first of 10 seemingly disconnected scenes through which our protagonist, Lotte, travels in her search for peace, love and a little bit of understanding.

Botho Strauss's play is anti-narrative at its best: episodic, disconnected, disorienting and almost Kafkaesque. Martin Crimp's translation strips back even further, disposing of much of the play's setting, cold war East Germany. Instead, Crimp uses this historical dead end as a jumping off point for a kind of any-place, no-place. It's a risk, leaving audiences even less to cling to, but this production manages to make that step a success.

Cate Blanchett is surprising in her role as Lotte. Bizarre, intimidating, hilarious, pitiful and endearing, she fills the stage like some sort of crazed angel. To lose sight of Lotte in this would be to lose sight of the production itself, but Blanchett ensures this is entirely impossible.

Not that her supporting cast isn't working hard creating some of the production's best moments. Belinda McClory is delightful as a woman destined for celebrity, trapped in a small town. We cross our fingers and hold our breath in the hope that Josh McConville, as a chess-loving nano-technician, might be Lotte's salvation. Johannes Schütz's minimal and intense stage design is another of the highlights. The familiar yet disconnected elements and their altered ratios feed directly into the thick sense of the uncanny that director Benedict Andrews has created.

The feeling that the payoff is eternally out of sight while the details are overwhelming is difficult as an audience. We suspect this is the point. There are no answers, and barely even a sense of a question, to this production. It is, as it intends to be, the minutiae of life, frustratingly impossible to dismiss or alter, magnified into absurd proportions.

Image: Chris Ryan and Cate Blanchett in Sydney Theatre Company’s Gross und Klein (Big and Small), photographer Lisa Tomasetti