BURIED CITY

Isolation and alienation are conditions most people are afflicted by from time to time, and a great deal of modern literature has been devoted to depicting these states. With Buried City, written by Raimondo Cortese, director Alicia Talbot from Bankstown-based Urban Theatre Projects shares very honest and unpatronising theatre about the changing nature of the urban city, and the resulting clash of values that affects the people who inhabit it.

Set in a gutted building primed for development, security workers, labourers and a local teenager come together for a night of emotional turmoil and brutality, their connections becoming an allegory of a city and society that is redefining itself in the face of social and economic change. While nothing particularly important happens over the course of the play, the acting is raw, and the interactions between the lost characters successfully captivate the audience. It is the lack of plot and the focus on the drama of the mundane that makes Buried City so authentic, and the individual stories of the characters so engaging.

Along with well-seasoned actors such as Russel Kiefel, and Meyne Wyatt who has a superb stage presence as a bright Aboriginal teenager, a fresh slant is brought to the production with Redfern-resident and singer-songwriter Perry Keyes in his theatrical debut as a security guard. Although the music interwoven through the drama seems jolting at times and stalls the action, it conjures a sense of the community shared by these strangers and a real-life authenticity to the depiction of their desperate attempts to reach out and make meaningful connections.

According to Alicia Talbot, “The buried city of the piece is the complex emotional territory we keep buried in ourselves and struggle with – the hidden thoughts and voices that are given little room for expression within the constructed social world of contemporary urban identity.” Buried City gives the Sydney-siders who go to see it a chance to think about this and reach into their own emotional lives. The final scene, with the teenage boy dancing wildly, seems to offer the message of the need to live life in the moment and enjoy all it has to offer, despite inevitable anxieties about the changing world around us.

Until Feb 5, Belvoir St Theatre, 25 Belvoir St, Surry Hills, $42-62, 9699 3444, belvoir.com.au

BY MARILYN HETRELES