Jack McGee
The beating heart of Hope (and what I love about it).
Hope’s best scene takes place early in its run-time. Adam, reunited with Irina, his old piano teacher, is coerced into trying to play the piano again. He knows it’s not going to go well, but he wants to believe that it will. Irina is convincing. He calls her a tiger, and she is one, overwhelming with hope and energy. He wants to believe her so bad. We want to believe her. It’s easy, to believe her.
Things start out okay. It’s a straightforward piece, at least for a concert pianist, and he’s warming up with one hand. We, the audience, are enraptured. If he isn’t actually playing live, it sure looks like he is, a credit to his performance, the direction (Lyndee Jane-Rutherford), and to the sound design (Chris Ward). Narratively, and logically, we know it’s not going to work, but the other shoe is drifting further and further up. Against our better instincts, we’re beginning to hope. Man, does it hurt when the heel finally falls.
The hope seemingly keeping Irina alive, a trait that is beautiful in her, is toxic and violent when applied to Adam. It’s ugly, visceral, and cruel. Suddenly we’re angry at it. We’re angry at her, which is a difficult feeling to sustain because she’s a deeply lovable character. Piercy, a professional vocal coach, performs her with vibrancy and an unsurprisingly consistent Ukrainian accent. Her defiant optimism, pointed point-blank at those around her, is both a blessing and a curse.
Operating at it’s finest, drama is a game of tennis. The ball is the central question, the characters are the players bouncing it back and forth, and we, the audience, are the people in the stands, comically swivelling our heads from side to side, persuaded again and again by every new perspective. For the duration of this scene, and in little snippets all around it, Hope is the Australian open. For the rest of it’s 90 minute run time, we have to peer through a gap in the fence to see it.
Everything that gets in the way.
Hope feels compressed. It feels like it was put in a vice and squeezed down to it’s size. This is felt most prominently in its dialogue. There’s an inherent suspension of disbelief required in how characters express their feelings on stage. In real life, people can take weeks, even months, to open up to one another, and in most plays a wide group of characters have to bare their hearts to each other, along with the audience, within a matter of days. Hope struggles to mask its machinations. Almost as soon as a scene has begun, the characters involved are sprinting to the emotional finish line. Characters open and flare up both quickly and often. We as an audience are left little room to breathe, and scenes quickly feel repetitive and rote.
Despite its all-star cast, none of Hope’s supporting performances quite make it out of the vice. Dodge’s Yulia narrowly avoids being completely one note. The high-dialled-bitter-frustration of her character is broken only by the occasional wistful mention of her new boyfriend. Porter is given the impossible task of quietly making Daniel so fragile that he can convincingly pivot to suicidal in the final minutes of the show. On that note, Buchanan has an insurmountable challenge to face in the show's opening - warm up the crowd and get some laughs via attempted suicide. While I can see the appeal of the scene thematically, it’s a tough ask of Buchanan, and a tougher watch for us.
These two suicide attempts necessitate an addition to Ian Harman’s design. Off to the side of the artfully designed apartment, there’s a stripped back bridge over a glowing stream. Visually, it looks like an afterthought, awkwardly separated from the rest of the set. Thematically, it’s a reminder of one of Hope’s more frustrating reoccurring subjects. While suicide is a core part of Adam’s story, I’d argue its presence in the play is unnecessary, or at the very least, underdeveloped. There’s a tendency in storytelling to use suicide as a quick way to create tangible stakes out of sadness. It’s a crutch. If Daniel, and even Adam, were able to communicate to us the hopelessness they felt without literally having to try and jump off a bridge, I honestly think it’d hit harder. Suicide, at least portrayed the way it is in Hope, is desensitised by its theatricality. It’s broad, not specific, and keeps me at a distance.
With Hope, Pattrick has constructed an elaborate new reality and there’s a huge amount of world building we need to be filled in on. Frustratingly, the vast majority of this is communicated to us via inorganic exposition. Characters will lengthily and oft-repeatedly opine on the specifics of their heavily-tax-cut world, in a manner that repeatedly pulls me out of the play. Part of the problem, is that Hope seems to care more about the details of its world than the story playing out inside of it. To be bold, I feel that Hope would lose very little of it’s power if it was to jettison it’s fictionalised resolution of the Ukraine war (Putin dies), it’s National-gone-wild tax cuts, and even the central conceit of it’s “last year of life act”. The emotion at the centre of the play would only grow from the extra space, given the opportunity to gain complexity as it progresses rather than shed it.
How Hope de-fangs itself.
For drama-as-tennis to work, it needs to be a fair game. Each side of the argument needs to be equally convincing, right until the final seconds, when finally - shock - the ball lands, just to one side of the net. An earned result. Better yet, maybe it doesn’t land. Maybe it balances on the net, two things true at once, leaving us, the audience, with the rest of our life to unpack a whopping case of cognitive dissonance.
Hope is not a close match. Every time anyone on the pro-hope side of the court goes for a swing, they hit it right to the back corner. The sceptical team are lucky to hit over the net. The points they make are not only given less time, or less focus, but drastically less oomph.
Let’s start with Adam’s character. The stakes here aren’t, should Adam kill himself or keep trying to find a way to play the piano? That’s a false dichotomy. It’s, should Adam continue to pursue piano or try to find meaning elsewhere? In favour of Adam continuing to play the piano, there is the ever persuasive Irina, and the inspiring story she found on Google; the unlikely recovery of kiwi pianist Michael Houstoun. Houstoun, a real person, had a similar condition to Adam and taught himself to play piano again, from scratch. It took him five years. In a poignant and extra-textual twist, Houstoun actually plays the bulk of Hope’s score. Composed by Briar Prastiti, the non-diegetic pieces are both sweeping and intimate, and the diegetic pieces blend in well. Having this heart-warming story of hope and recovery built into the framework of the play makes a strong case for Adam continuing to learn the piano. There’s far less work put into balancing the scale in the opposite direction.
The thing that leads Adam to suicide is that he’s built his life on shoddy foundations. There’s one thing holding him up; his music. This is tragic, and initially Hope acknowledges that, as they painfully sit him back at the piano. Once Irina discovers Houstoun’s story, the play forgets all about it, however. Adam displays the most surface level version of being conflicted by claiming “I’ll think about it” all while everything inside and outside the text is pushing him towards his piano. Then, aside from him half-heartedly building a friendship with Daniel, he’s essentially considered a resolved character for the final act, serving as a mouth-piece for the positive side of blind-hope against the ever sceptical Yulia. To be clear, I don’t think there’s a right answer here. Houstoun’s story is proof that people can prevail against the most difficult conditions, but Adam’s choice to follow in that path doesn’t feel earned, or weighted. Without a compelling case pushing against it, it feels unsatisfying, and we’re left with the wrong kind of lingering questions. Ultimately, it’s hard to care.
Then we have Irina. Irina is making a sci-fi version of a choice that people make every day, whether or not to receive chemotherapy. Hope’s abstracted it, heavily, by making it more of a moral choice about the suffering of other people (children in a cancer ward dying from limited supplies) rather than her own pain, but chemo is the real life equivalent. The abstraction is the problem.
Chemotherapy is ugly. The futuristic “latest cancer drugs” of Hope are not. They’re injected into Irina via a tube, and while it’s a little uncomfortable to look at, her hair isn’t falling out. The reason this would be a difficult choice in real life is because what people go through to fight cancer is fundamentally and heartbreakingly painful. It’s war. The reason it’s a difficult choice in the play is because there are children dying off-stage and the drugs are from the black-market, so they may or may not be safe. Inherently, I think this is not only less compelling, but actually winds up feeling a little pithy in comparison to the real choices that so many brave people make.
Hope has ultimately chosen not to engage with chemo, so let’s be generous, and meet it on its own terms. Let’s ignore the elephant in the room and engage with it purely on the grounds of scarcity in health funding. It’s still not a fair fight. Yulia, is the play’s ambassador for the counter-argument. Initially, she appears completely opposed to Irina taking the drugs, on the basis that they need to be going to children, or people more likely to survive, instead. By the end of the play, it’s revealed that Yulia doesn’t actually believe in this philosophy. She believes in a third option, that all the characters uniformly agree on. The real issue here is the heavy tax-cuts imposed by the government that have depleted resources to the point where we can’t afford medication. She continues to argue for it, however, because as she repeatedly states, it’s “the law.” Dramatically, this idea is weightless. No one on-stage believes in this, so why should we believe in it? By pointing the finger at an outside culprit, that we the audience are already more than happy to blame, all air in the dramatic balloon is deflated. It’s completely removed from the central question, and there’s no tension left. It’s equally confusing on a character level. Surely the more pressing concern would remain the children dying in her ward.
In its last minutes, however, Hope once again goes for the cake. It turns out that Irina should not have been taking the black-market-drugs after all, as they were laced with opiates and have been making her sicker. There’s not a character motivation for taking Irina off the drugs, instead, it’s once again the consequences of the unseen tax-cuts. In the real world, is corporate greed and the fast-creeping-rise of right wing politics the source of most of our problems? Undoubtedly yes. But that’s a different play, one that Hope is only interested in as far as letting it deflate the tough questions it put so much work into setting up. Perhaps the play has been squeezed too tight, and has no space left to truly wrangle with it? Still, if it is ultimately a play about the devastating harm being put on our country by the current National government, it’s an ineffective one. It only has players on one side of the court.
Hope is still on at Circa Theatre till the 23rd of Feb. You can book tickets here. For a different perspective on the work, I’d recommend reading John Smythe’s thorough review of the play here.