“I have tried to write a version of this story for many years but was never quite able to finish. A solitary figure, unable to connect, abandoned at the edge of the world.”
In Shore Break, Chris Pitman has undoubtedly succeeded with this succinct monologue which crests and breaks like the intimidating waves it so vividly invokes.
This richly metaphoric, but also forensically realistic, account of a young man’s diminishing destiny begins in a classroom. Our unnamed narrator is describing his English class. The hapless teacher, Budgie, is desperately trying to imbue disaffected schoolboys with a sense of the splendour and perils of existence.
He wants them to learn poetry by heart that will stay with them in later life. One particular poem – The Lure of the Desert Land, by Madge Morris – describes an overwhelming “soundless fury” hiding the world and quenching the sun, leaving “just you, and your soul and nothing there”.
For our anti-hero, this existential isolation is not in the desert but on the edge of it – “where it meets the sea”, giving way “to this scrubby flat-arsed dune”.
A longtime surfer and beach dweller himself, Pitman is intrigued by those boon companions with their boards and their pursuit of the perfect wave. It is such an Australian theme. The Endless Summer, the bleached, tanned hedonism that captured young people especially in the ’60s and ’70s, is both a glorious example and a cliché of the Australian idyll.
But for a young man dropping out of school, at odds with parents defeated by life, and with few prospects in a privileged world, the beach is also a kind of last resort. It is his father, continually stoked on alcohol and withdrawn into mute isolation, who introduces our narrator to the mystery and grandeur of the surf, of pitting oneself against the dangers and glories of the ocean. Not that he joined in. He left him by himself – to sink or swim – and headed to the pub instead.
In Brink’s outstanding production, Pitman has not only written (in collaboration with co-directors Chelsea Griffith and Chris Drummond) an exceptional play, but performs it splendidly. He has featured memorably in productions ranging from a long stint in Cloudstreet to recent triumphs in Glengarry Glen Ross and The Dictionary of Lost Words. But here he excels even further.
In the Space Theatre, the simple set (devised by Pitman) consists of a rectangular rough coir mat, a folding beach chair, a plastic crate draped with a wetsuit, beach towels and a white surfboard. Bathed in buttery summer light by the excellent Sue Grey-Gardner, it is theatre at its most rudimentary and immediate. No soundscapes, no shifts of décor, projection screens, or music. It is an actor with his text.
In a tan T-shirt, jeans and bare feet, Pitman sits in his chair, sometimes sanding his surfboard, telling a story which is an amalgam of memories, observations, and imaginings. His delivery is relaxed, laconic, droll. It is understated and restrained, drawing us closer. Bringing us into his confidence, telling it, often amusingly, like it is.
When the unnamed man later reveals the dark path of prison and violence, and his ultimate desolation confronting his torments, Pitman is compelling, never straying into bombast or false emotion. The performance is astutely weighted, never too ocker (to dredge up a lost term), and effortlessly carries the ambition of its metaphor, and social and psychological commentary.
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Pitman introduces a range of characters, all of them shrewdly and deftly drawn: his father, who has retreated into silent anger and defeat, sitting at the table every night but never really there; his mother, determinedly vibrant and earthy but vacant all the same; Kate, his one real chance at love – lost, as he replicates his father’s misanthropic dissociation.
Like a bogan Beckett character, Pitman’s creation knows the world is “cooked” but has no words or strategies to counteract this. Except on his surfboard. When he enters that epicentre of towering ocean wave motion, navigating that tunnel, that “free ride through the barrel”. That is when he triumphantly posits balance and perfection against chaos and failure.
Shore Break is a most welcome inclusion in State Theatre’s Stateside umbrella program. There has always been a distinctively Australian version of suppressed rage and emotional locked-in syndrome – in multiple generations of men – and it is more destructively evident than ever. In an engaging, accessible, and insightful 75 minutes, Pitman has put words to the inarticulate suffering and damage of many.
This production has much to say and deserves a touring life well beyond this limited season. In the meantime, there are still four more performances. Don’t miss out.
Shore Break, presented by Brink Productions in association with Adelaide Festival Centre and State Theatre Company South Australia, continues in the Space Theatre until September 7.
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