The Lewis Trilogy
Griffin Theatre Company
February 24
Until April 21
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★★½

In just a few months, the SBW Stables Theatre will be razed to the ground in preparation for a rebuild. This magical space, shoe-horned into a tiny wedge of land between the freeways and laneways of Kings Cross, has been a crucible for Australian theatre for half a century, first as the home of the Nimrod Theatre Company (which would become Belvoir) and then as the home of Griffin Theatre Company, devoted exclusively to developing and performing new Australian writing.

To mark this historic moment, Griffin artistic director Declan Greene has chosen to present The Lewis Trilogy by Louis Nowra, “the godfather of Australia’s ratbag, iconoclastic stage-writers”. This triple-bill of full-length plays has been artfully adapted by Nowra, Greene and associate director Daley Rangi into three tight one-acters, to be presented across an afternoon and evening.

We first meet Lewis in Summer of the Aliens, an impressionistic fever dream of growing up in 1960s Australia. Nostalgia clashes with contemporary hindsight as Lewis (Philip Lynch) and his friend Dulcie (Masego Pitso) try to make some kind of sense of life’s everyday strangeness. Then in Cosi Lewis (Lynch again) is a recent university graduate, hired to direct a play put on by the inmates of a mental institution. Finally, in This Much is True, we meet an older Lewis (William Zappa), now a writer “between divorces”, and the colourful parade of characters he meets in Woolloomooloo’s Rising Sun Inn.

Individually, the three plays work well: Summer of the Aliens is impressionistic, powered by imagination and a sense of wonder, mostly sustained but with occasional dips in energy. Cosi is a warm hug of absurdity meets humanity, while This Much is True is a stunning piece of writing, bleak and engaging in equal measure. Cumulatively, they pack a punch, not just in the way common threads have been cleverly woven together, but in the communal experience – shared between the cast and the audience – of traversing this great gamut of human life.

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The creative team transforms the challenging space with a few well-chosen touchpoints. Set designer Jeremy Allen uses a cinema hoarding, a red velvet curtain and a grungy bar to make a world, while Melanie Liertz’s costumes are a delicious mix of restraint and distressed glamour. The cast of Cosi is wrangled into triumphant six-part chorus by Adam Majsay and the underscoring for Summer of the Aliens (Daniel Herten) transforms a bare stage into a moment of existential dread.

The cast is glorious, an ensemble of eight who juggle multiple characters across more than four hours on stage. Thomas Campbell, Paul Capsis, Nikki Viveca and Ursula Yovich confound all expectations, with a brave and brilliant embrace of playing across gender, sexuality, ability and cultural boundaries.

Meanwhile, Darius Williams, as pyromaniac Doug and bipolar Wesley, and Pitso, as Dulcie, Julie and Gretel, are both mesmerising. Zappa’s age-worn, stage-torn voice makes Nowra’s lyrical evocations of down-at-heel Woolloomooloo fly, and it is a magnificent lynchpin across the three works.