The Realistic Joneses | Ad Astra
Most people spend their Easter Monday’s recovering from chocolate comas, going to the beach or stuck in traffic as they’re trying to get home from their long weekend getaway. Not me. I was at the theatre, sipping my glass of red with no chocolate eggs in sight, watching Ad Astra’s production of The Realistic Joneses unfold.
Playwright Will Eno creates a world in which the ideals of what define normalcy are side to side with behaviours, dinner conversations and character quirks that one might deem absurd. The Joneses truly are realistic and aren’t afraid to speak their minds about subjects that society deems taboo or overshare intimate details. The tension this creates makes us laugh, but it also makes us reflect on what society governs as a respectable conversation and whether we should repress or embrace our awkward reactions. It’s quite extraordinary. However, I did feel a bit let down from the way Eno ended the show. It felt like half of the scene had been cut out and not in a post-dramatic, purposefully open-ended kind of way.
Director Fiona Kennedy transforms the stage into two adjacent households – one of the senior’ Joneses’ and one of the junior Joneses’ as I like to call them. There was a beautiful contrast between the senior’ Joneses more lived in, established garden compared to the stripped back nature of the junior Joneses kitchen. This might be a spoiler, so fair warning, but I interpreted the younger couple to be the younger version of the older Joneses in quite a literal sense. Ghosts of the past as you might call it. Very spooky.
The cast - consisting of Claire Argente, Jacqueline Kerr, Robert Wainwright and Gregory J Wilken – all brought such nuance to their characters. As an audience member, I was invested in all of their narratives from the get go and the anticipation to find out what would happen next was exhilarating.
At times, the stagehands were too distracting in the blackouts, making clangs as they moved tables and chairs on and off the stage which made me cringe in my seat for them. There was a blackout in act two that was ten-fifteen seconds too long in which no props or set was moved on and offstage in which I assumed it was the end of the show and even started to clap.
But technical faults aside, the show was an intellectual feast and the stagecraft was of a high calibre. My Easter Monday was well spent.
