Foxy family: Guy Simon. Sarah Meacham and Amy Hack. Photo: Brett Boardman
Refreshing different and wonderfully funny, Rita Kalnejais’s play is not easily categorised. But you will be entertained. And whatever you read into the underlying messages, you will laugh – and, given everything that is going on in the world, that is a something to be cherished!
At its heart is a love story, between Basti (Bardiya McKinnon) and Rdeca (Sarah Meacham)). Basti is 14 (about the same age as Romeo, of Juliet fame), and is being bullied at school. His dad Simon (Matthew Whittet) is more interested in flirting with the free-spirited 20-something woman who lives upstairs (Amy Hack). Rdeca has problems of her own. Not only does she have fleas, but her formidable mother Cochineal (Rebecca Massey) is pushing her into making her first kill, an unfortunate mole called Gregor (also played by Whittet). Rdeca is not happy about this, but her mother insists it is her destiny. Rdeca is a fox.
(I don’t know what’s going on here – there’s been a lot of this lately, what with Jamie Oxenbould’s monkey man in Trevor; Jamie O’Sullivan’s Cat in Wink; and Thomas Campbell’s Mastiff and Alex Francis’s Moor-Hen in The Moors – but this romance between human and vixen is a modern fable of family values, including domestic and instinctive violence, as well as being, to quote the program, “plain freaky”. The team behind First Love is the Revolution think it is what Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox would be if it were adapted for Netflix by Margaret Atwood, which is fair enough.)
These star-cross’d lovers from different species of the animal kingdom both have their families to contend with. Massey is mesmerising as the ferociously loving and practical matriarch of the fox family. She has some wonderful lines, disparaging lesser species confident that foxes are the superior animals and that humans are just unbelievably cruel. You have to love her. Killing is what foxes do, especially to stupid chickens and mice (“with their tedious bloody chatter”). Whittet’s Simon on the other hand is less lovely. He wants his son to “man up”, learn to to fight, but his motives are less honourable, more selfish.
Then there’s the question of who exactly killed Rdeca’s father in a hit and run.
Love being blind and all, Basti has no trouble falling for Rdeca when he catches her in a trap and sets about taming her. Just as McKinnon has all the demeanour and fallibility of a 14-year-old adolescent, Meacham is a great little vixen: her body language, the tilt of her chin, her alert movements all combine to make us believe she is a fox. Hack, who switches between multiple roles with aplomb, including Rdeca’s sister, is unforgettable in a spectacular cameo as a cat. Likewise Guy Simon, who as well as playing Rdeca’s brother Thoreau, is a fabulously agro dog called Rovis, whose mission it is to protect chickens and kill foxes and uppity cats. As for the chickens, clad in anoraks and party hats, they are hysterical – one of many reasons to go see First Love is the Revolution – and here they face their destiny (to be someone’s dinner) with a cute fatality. Of course chooks are not generally considered cute – not like cats or pet dogs, for example – and there are plenty of people who think foxes are vermin. Kalnejais subtly challenges our diverse reactions to animals of all kinds.
All this is played out on designer Ella Butler’s arresting set, which at once is a back garden, a living room and the great outdoors. The Stables stage has been transformed into a grassy hillock, with grassed-over armchair and a white oven at the back. Sort of Magritte meets Jeff Koons. All credit too to Trent Suidgeest’s lighting and David Bergman’s sound, which combine to transport us from urban kitchens to trysts outside under a full moon, and other places besides.
The play runs for 105 minutes and under Lee Lewis’s excellent direction is tight and entertaining from start to finish. I’m not going to tell you how it finishes, but it is parodic and funny, and you should go see for yourselves. Recommended
Tickets from $20-62. Until 14 December
