Where Are You, My Only One? is a new New Zealand work. Written by Vanessa Rhodes, it is, at the end of the day, a love story. Robert ‘Bob’ McLean (Gavin Rutherford), a simple farmer living near Hamilton meets, through what seems to be a slightly less sinister kind of mail-order bride business, Yulia (Andrea Tutt), a Russian single mother searching for a place in the world and a man to fill the hole in her heart. Yulia lives with her cantankerous and fiercely patriotic mother Ludmila (Donna Akersten). Yulia and Bob exchange letters, phone calls and packages and the connection between them grows. They hit somewhat of a road bump when Bob buys Yulia a ticket to New Zealand and she is torn between her family—as her son is called into the army and her mother emotionally blackmails her with the hurt of the past—and her heart.
And, well, that’s kind of it.
Only One manages, with lots of effort, to distend that plot out to one hour and twenty minutes and, really, its ability to make it last that long (and feel much longer than that) is the only real thing I can praise about this production.
This is what they call the deadly theatre. Empty, boring and ugly. The script is an exercise in wheel-spinning intercut with some highly questionable, and probably unintentional, messages about gender and politics. The direction is lazy, trudging murderously along, threatening to send the audience to sleep at any moment. The acting is serviceable, though the accents frequently slip to a ridicioulous comic degree, and Rutherford is simply rehashing the same nice simple harmless country bumpkin performance he has been wheeling out for the past year or so. Each design element on its own is fine if deeply unremarkable. But they clash. Horribly. Jennifer Lal’s coloured lights make John Hodgkins’ curved set garish, and Paul Jenden’s costumes stand out mainly due to how little they match anything around them.
Overall there seems to have been no thought into what this production might be like to watch. It is awkwardly staged, the actors seem unfamiliar with the set that encroaches onto their space and leaves little room for the dances that occur in what I suppose were intended to be ‘dream sequences’, but thought they had the potential to be a welcome break from the monotony of the main storyline. Their staging is just lazy and uninspired, with no real attempt to understand what function they might serve in the script or even to make them at all interesting or enjoyable to watch.
Where Are You, My Only One? is a failure. A damp squip, puttering out to a cloud of indifference. As I sat in my seat, one thought kept hitting me, over and over, like a Newton’s Cradle made of fists. ‘These people just don’t care.’ There was no feeling in this production. No love. No need. No inspiration. It was simply hollow and empty.
Disappointing. Deeply disappointing.
Where Are You, My Only One?
Written by Vanessa Rhodes
Directed by Susan Wilson
With Donna Akersten, Andrea Tutt and Gavin Rutherford
At Circa Two
5 Sept–4 Oct 2009