Independent Theatre. Star Theatres. 16 May 2025
Callum Logan gazes intently from the front of Independent Theatre’s program for Ordinary People, his sweet face set against dark and stormy waters.
At the end of the play’s performance in Star Theatres, that image has become indelibly impressed into the folds of audience grey matter. And one has been drawn into the post traumatic angst of the young man as if by some sort of emotional magnet.
Of course, it is Rob Croser’s directorial insight which has thus captured the heart, with the choice of a deeply affecting piece of American drama and an exceptional lead actor.
Ordinary People, adapted from a Judith Guest 1976 novel and directed by Robert Redford, was a multi-award-winning film featuring Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland with Timothy Hutton in 1980.
It was and is all about an affluent suburban-Chicago family after the favoured older son has drowned in a boating accident. A year later, the surviving son, Conrad Jarrett struggles to find his place in both his family and his peer-group world and at last seeks the help of a psychiatrist.
Thus does this play traverse the lumpy layers of guilt and blame which envelop loss and grief. It’s a universal theme, of course, thus highly relatable for all, and very well studied in a work, adapted for the stage by Nancy Gilsenan.
It embraces Conrad’s relationship with his swim team buddies, the girl who befriended him in hospital care, the new local girl with her own problems, not to mention an over-protective father and a love-stunted mother. The audience becomes fly-on-the-wall to the interactions with the psychiatrist and, indeed, gains some added respect for the very difficult role psychiatrists play in this world.
One’s heart goes out in all directions as the play develops.
Croser and fellow designer David Roach have contained the action in a bland box set with a steeply raked stage.
First impression is that it is all too austere and a little logistically awkward with the actors carrying props in and out. But, that very aesthetic simplicity embellished only by lighting hues and shadows, seems to magnify the characters and, at the same time, suggest the suppression of emotional expression. The more one ponders it, the more that barren set has to offer.
This play is a splendid vehicle for Callum Logan, a fresh young actor who is turning heads all over the place. After distinguishing himself in a recent Fleurieu Festival Shakespearean variety show, he now displays his depth and versatility with a tour de force depiction of the complexity of grief and loss and family dysfunction a la American 20th-century theatre. Logan delivers youthful charm and fun, hair-trigger fury, and romantic tenderness - well-wrought aspects of this complex character, all with a good American accent.
There are lively junior actors onstage, also: college swim mates nicely played by Ryan Kennealy and Oscar McLean, wet-haired and in budgie smugglers. Olivia McAdam and Cleo Barker give credibility to the two girls in his orbit. Fahad Farooque plucks most movingly on the heartstrings as Conrad’s lost soul of a caring father while Lyn Wilson, not quite as aptly cast, turns on believably brittle awfulness as the mother who has trouble in showing love to this lesser of her sons.
Steven Turner is Dr Barker, the psychiatrist. He’s comfortable, deceptively casual with his big mugs of coffee in hand, his role providing the play's intellectual balance on the whys and wherefores of grief. It is a potently simpatico performance.
Veteran actor David Roach can play anything, and he does, nicely - both the swim coach and the Texas uncle.
The quality of Croser's direction and the intensity of the performances create a tight and terrific production, entirely absorbing and thought-provoking.
And, of course, the chance to see this modest but brilliant young actor, Callum Logan.
Samela Harris
When: 16 to 24 May
Where: Star Theatres
Bookings: Independenttheatre.org.au
