Handle With Care | Virag Dombay, Gabby Fitzgerald, Zac Lawrence & Lachlan Driscoll
Handle with Care is a new play by some young Brisbane creatives. It’s one of my favourite things in the world, being a play written, produced, marketed, and dreamed into being by a group of young people who literally do all the things. It’s a passion play, where they co-created their own work and did all the things to make it come alive. So full kudos for that cause there are a hell of a lot of creatives who only participate in other people’s visions (also a valid choice, but I digress); this is a whole other ball game. It takes guts.
The play moves around the relationships of the two men in our protagonist Abbie’s life, but at its core the bigger story is that of female friendship, and the damage done when that falls apart. It’s only been in the last few years that the value of female friendship is beginning to be recognised and written about, the true unconditional nature of the love that is shared, that pushes one or the other to step far outside their comfort zone, or to see a little burning kernel of a wildheart hidden in a studious and forlorn wallflower.
That’s what we see here, a trip down memory lane where Abbie (Virag DOmbay) is moving house and processing the high- and low-lights of her late teens and early twenties. As she packs and repacks her boxes of stuff she gets an increasingly-piercing series of flashbacks to the three core people in her life. Her flatmate Sam (Zac Lawrence), lover Ben (Lachlan Driscoll), and bestie Chloe (Gabby Fitzgerald).
I’d call this style of show and topic matter normcore, in the style popularised by Lena Dunham and others in the early twenty-teens. This play isn’t picking at the biggest issues in society, it’s not trying to save the world, it’s looking a simple angle of an ordinary kind of life in a gang of young people who have come of age in the aughts. It’s an old storyline; two friends who had a passionate yet unlikely friendship who ultimately don’t stand the test of time.
The show starts a little shaky on its second night run, as the night advances all the performers get more sure of their positions. I want to see them start the show with more of that certainty and take us there too. The stagecraft is a little fluffy, I get the sense of trying to fit everything in at once when it could be a bit sharper and cleaner. The surreality of the repetitive dreamscapes that keep building is wild enough without the need to also create realism; I’d love to lean into the dreamscape aspects more. The slamming of doors opening and closing all around Abbie creates a sense of mental health on the edge. There’s a thin bead of tension that kicks in early in the show that keeps rising, as we see Chloe’s increasing wildness and alcoholism causing havoc in the small quad of friends. Ben’s eagerness for a ‘normal’ kind of life is at once a steadying influence and a challenging restraint. In the end the slightly over-eager flatmate is probably the friend who has the most regard for Abbie’s true self.
For a moment I thought it was going to go hectic so the swerve back to the centre path at the end was unexpected. I’d like to see it again, it could benefit from all the trappings of a real stage and sharpened up with a dramaturg. For all that the old-sharehouse vibes of the tiny space suited the tone and made it feel very authentic. A strong effort from a new collective.
