BEFORE/AFTER

Much like the treasured, mythological baseball in Don DeLillo’s operatic postmodern masterpiece Underworld, a non-linear narrative necessarily requires a through-line; an arc, hefted into the sky by the author’s hand at first base, deftly caught at home-run. That thing can be a ball and its movement, it can be a character we see ourselves mirrored in, it can be anything at all, in fact, as long as we see and know it at the beginning, and we still see and know it at the end.

German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Vorher/Nachher (Before/After) qualifies for such a thing. In 51 scenes, through 39 characters, using 110 light bulbs and via a space organism, lovers cheat, hotdogs talk, husbands disappear into pastoral portraits, one poor woman wakes up as one person and lies down as another, two handymen endlessly alight ladders and a bevy of models get abducted in a war in between giving the President blow jobs. Yes, all of that, and more.

This is not a fractured fable but a broken one, broken, shattered, and somewhat haywire. The open-ended script has been staged by director Cristabel Sved in an open-walled hotel room – a natural choice, given the anonymity and lack of temporality of the scenes. Tiny cameras get us up-close and under the covers (literally), mic breaks signify an outsider narration, and the canopy is dusted with a galaxial spread of lights. It’s all fairly loose (read: occasionally, clunky), and much like the sordid hotel room Schimmelpfennig’s obsessions seem to steer us ever towards sex, sexual betrayal and sexual power – even the space organism is eventually entered and dominated by a nameless ‘Hunter’.

That is a thematic through-line sure enough but is it enough? Two hours later we sense, ultimately, it is perhaps not. Sex is not just about sex but about connection, and this feels too disconnected as a whole. Schimmelpfenning even seems to suspect as much. He opens and closes with ‘The Woman Over Seventy,’ who tells us of memory, and familial love, and that humour is most important of all. That is his baseball, and I wish we saw more of it.

Until Feb 19, Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company, Hickson Rd, Walsh Bay, $25, 9250 1777, sydneytheatre.com.au