Australian playwright Daniel Keene, has a wealth of credits already to his name, although most Australian theatregoers are not familiar with his work. Although he has had productions staged in Australia, most notably The Night Watchman for Griffin in 2007, Keene’s writing has found more success in Europe than at home. Audiences in France and Berlin especially rave when a new Keene play hits their stages. For the Sydney Theatre Company, Keene’s latest work The Serpent’s Teeth hits Australian stages in two parts; Citizens and Soliders.

The STC Actor’s Company forms the ensemble for both plays, with Tim Maddock directing Soldiers and Pamela Rabe taking a step behind the scenes with her directing debut, Citizens. There is no denying the strength of this unique acting ensemble, although my own growing frustrations with the sameness of casting in Actor’s Company productions were thankfully blown away in The Serpent’s Teeth. Recently added members Luke Mullins, Emily Russell, Ewen Leslie and Steve Le Marquand add refreshing energy into the group. The two plays are distinct in the types of people they focus on, but both explore the issues of those affected, indirectly and in more direct ways, by war. Citizens takes us on several monotonous journeys of characters walking past a never-ending wall, and their struggle to find the means to survive when war hangs eerily ever-present. Soldiers transports us inside an aircraft hangar with the families of soldiers who are returning home in coffins to tears of anguish instead of joy. 

Citizens is strikingly Beckettian in style. We watch as characters traipse back and forth, carting goods, seeking their own needs and wondering if they will ever reach their destination. Journeys take longer than expected. The sun is hot. Some stories are given much more time to grow than others. The bottom line is that war affects everyone, and the wall is a constant symbol of how war has failed the citizens and how they have been stripped of their rightful freedoms. There are several well-realised scenes. Hayley McElhinney and Peter Carroll’s daughter and father scenes, en route to the funeral of Carroll’s brother whom he did not love, find resonance and poignancy. Emily Russell and McElhinney’s two women who meet to exchange lemons and textbooks, is quite touching. Most notably, John Gaden and young newcomer John Denyer’s old man and grandson, travelling to swap an olive tree for an orange tree echoes the truest humanity.

Unfortunately, Citizens is too long and drawn out. Many scenes seem rash and unnecessary, hardly fleshed out at all. A man rushes in, anguished, screaming into a mobile phone for a friend or a brother. Almost immediately he is gone and never seen again. I travelled along quite contentedly with the play, believing it existed within a limbo, not specific to any time or place. To my confusion, suddenly women appeared wearing headscarfs and Middle-Eastern sounding names were used. The inconsistencies were jarring. If this was to be the Middle East, are we to believe that the wall is such as that in Palestine? Aesthetically, the wall itself did not suit the play. Clean and unscuffed, it did not seem to be a wall that people were trying to destroy or even rallied against. Pamela Rabe’s direction of the actors in Citizens was deftly done. Although inconsistencies and a lagging pace rendered this first play a little lacklustre.

Soldiers is a welcome change. Where in Citizens there stood a wall, there now stands the massive steel doors of an aircraft hangar. Empty, cold and echoing, it is in this play that the design team shows their talents. Nick Schlieper’s lighting design is kept very dark, with shards of light illuminating the grief and darkness in spurts. Robert Cousins’ set is immense and devoid of warmth. The hangar is filled with family members, connected by their losses. Brothers, sons, husbands and nephews make up the bodies of those they wait for, and they are holed up and left to bide their time until the plane arrives. The characters speak with awkwardly placed humour, with deep agony and guilt. The life they inject into the space and their exchanges with each other are impassioned and full of raw humanity. There are some moments of genuine and perfect honesty. Pamela Rabe as the mother, with the young son of another deceased soldier buzzing around her with an aeroplane is one such moment. There is some great ensemble work while Rabe speaks of her own guilt.

However, despite all this, Soldiers left me surprisingly unmoved. The dialogue was often full of sweeping statements about grief and death, which felt very hollow to me. Yet the main reason I felt cold towards the victim’s families is because Keene’s script is concerned too much with feelings and does not attempt to give us information about the victim’s themselves. Save a few comments, I did not get a sense of who these men really were, and so did not feel much empathy with their loved ones. Again I felt the same problems with time and place as in Soldiers. I believed the characters universal and not needing a context, until when the plane does arrive, Maddock has the Australian national anthem play. After not suspecting anything distinctly Australian about the characters, this was jarring also.

It is only in the final moments of Soldiers that my heart was truly gripped. When the aircraft arrives, amidst the deafening engine noise and whipping wind of its landing, the victim’s families gather around. Some hold each other close, some break down, some stumble, all have trouble finding a place to stand. The lights are blinding and they stand as silhouettes, unable to avoid the outcome, now that the bodies have arrived. It is a breathtaking moment, but for me was not justified by the scenes leading up to it.

Photo: Eden Falk, Ewen Leslie & Luke Mullins. Photo: Brett Boardman.