★★★½☆ Caleb Lewis’s new play offers a swarm of competing ideas with a sobering message.

Red Stitch Actors Theatre, St. Kilda
June 17, 2016

We need to talk about the bees. All over the planet, these insects are disappearing, and as vital pollinators of crops, our fate is bound to theirs. The root cause of the so-called “colony collapse disorder” isn’t fully understood. Some experts blame mites, others fungus, but what is known is that the main symptom is an inexplicable exodus, leaving the hive empty save for one helpless individual, the queen.

Insect behaviour is as far removed from human emotions as it’s possible to be, but that doesn’t stop us anthropomorphising this deadly scenario. The queen is a mother abandoned by her children; the hive, a home transformed into a tomb. These parallels have been the scaffolding on which Caleb Lewis has hung the tense, intimate drama of his new play, innocuously titled The Honey Bees. Rather than looking at the global, ecological impact of bee death, Lewis focuses in on a far more parochial framework, exploring the strained dynamics of a West Australian family of beekeepers.

In the remote, red-earthed outback of WA, Joan (Marta Kaczmarek) and her daughter Clo (Rebecca Bower) run the family farm and it’s once popular honey business. Joan is a hard-faced, bullshit-intolerant matriarch, a Polish immigrant who has had to work hard for everything she has. Times are tough – cheaper brands and faux-honey knock-offs have crushed their sales and almost all the business’s workforce has walked out. In a bid to stay afloat, her son, Daryl (Christopher Brown) – a city boy with a bee allergy, completely incompatible with his isolated childhood home – has brokered a deal to sell the family’s healthy insects to cashed-up American farmers. Manipulated by her mother, Clo is resigned to a future tending the hives started by her deceased father, although her girlfriend Kerrie (Katerina Kotsonis) dreams of a future far away from the buzzing and the stifling heat, in Sydney’s Surry Hills. The unexpected arrival of Melissa (Eva Seymour), a teenage stranger with an uncanny knack for bee-charming, reveals some dark truths from the family’s past.

Katerina Kotsonis and Rebecca Bower

Lewis has packed a huge amount of storytelling into this one-act, 90-minute show, and sometimes it feels unnecessarily crowded. This complex narrative offers a swarm of ideas: the repercussions of a damaged childhood; the suffocating burden of familial responsibility; the sordid truth of a father idolised by his children; the desperate struggle to save a family business; and of course, the imminent threat of dying bees. All compete for attention and while individually each plotline offers something intriguing, it’s not always clear what conclusions we’re meant to glean from this thick-and-fast scattershot of revelations.

Lewis’s text may be fit to burst with twists and turns, but director Ella Caldwell has made the most of the occasional lulls in this plot’s otherwise fraught pace. It’s here that we find the most engaging, resonant moments, in a tender embrace between Clo and Kerrie, or a candid confession from Daryl. By allowing more space to occasionally buffer the momentum, the cast has a little more room to breathe some authenticity into these roles, although with such a multi-layered narrative, the nuanced subtleties of a more detailed characterisation is often sacrificed for moving the plot along.

The technical finesse of Red Stitch’s productions is consistently impressive. Here, a superbly choreographed sound and lighting design (by Daniel Nixon and Daniel Anderson respectively) paired with Sophie Woodward’s simple, rusty-earthed stage, evokes the scorched expanses of Australia’s red desert while creating the inescapable claustrophobia of a remote farmhouse.

This play is in need of a bit of an edit, but Lewis has an excellent aptitude for believable dialogue and a brilliant understanding of emotional counterpoint. Created as part of Red Stitch’s Ink programme, which commissions and champions new Australian work, this text puts a uniquely Aussie spin on a highly relevant, contemporary subject, and for that reason alone, it is a welcome addition to our stage. But what of the bees? Ultimately, the human story eclipses the insect one, but perhaps The Honey Bees’ bleak conclusion is a more sobering allegory than it first appears: doom is inevitable, so make the most of your life before it’s too late.


Red Stitch Actors Theatre presents The Honey Bees until July 16.

TICKETS

Limelight subscriptions start from $4 per month, with savings of up to 50% when you subscribe for longer.