It Just Stopped
"Stephen Sewell is seeking dramatic form for what he sees as the delusion we are all living: we cling to our lifestyle even though we know it is unsustainable — in fact, not only unsustainable, but actually ruinous to the world that gave us life" — director Neil Armfield.
With It Just Stopped, Sydney's historic inner-city Belvoir Street Theatre has reopened with a bang. Armfield masterfully realises Sewell's nightmarish doomsday vision of the future, when the ultimate consequences of climate change invade lounge rooms everywhere.
The play, which had a Melbourne season earlier this year, sports an excellent cast, a morbidly witty script and a maestro at the helm, thankfully placing it in an entirely different league to Sewell's previous wandering, nonsensical work The United States of Nothing.
In provocative style, new life is brought to an old question that has been pondered not only by ecology-conscious individuals, but also in profoundly different ways in films such as 28 Days Later, Mad Max and even The Day After Tomorrow.
How would we relate to each other if one day, suddenly and silently, it all "just stopped"?
Franklin (Kim Gyngell) and Beth (Catherine McClements) are a dysfunctional couple from the US living in a modern Australian apartment. He's a music writer for the New Yorker and an apologist for Wagner's anti-Semitism; she's a producer for an ultra-right-wing shock jock.
After many of their First-World facilities expire, all their prejudices, fears and ignorance quickly surface.
Who'll go outside and find others to establish what's going on? They can't even begin to ask themselves what to do, much like the politicians governing us today.
Beth blurts out, "What do I know about the news — I work in talk-back radio?!" and "I don't know how the stuff that needs to get done gets done, I just assumed it does. I've no idea how this society works!"
An Aussie cardboard-box capitalist Bill (John Wood) and his variously demure and ragingly anti-imperialist wife Pearl (Rebecca Massey) enter the fray. The play begins to resemble a dream sequence as Sewell's humour turns significantly blacker.
Armfield builds multiple layers into the drama as Sewell's script asks more questions, shifting the theme away from the logistics of power failure to the hidden relationships of human conflict that underpin our society.
When the tempestuous, brutal end eventually arrives, a suspicion stirs that we're not glimpsing the future at all — the nightmare is now. Humanity is living an environmental and social catastrophe and avoiding the biggest question of all: which way out, and at what cost?
As the director observes: "The extraordinary thing is that we can see it happening: we can see how hopeless our systems are and yet we continue in the dream of denial. It doesn't make sense. And yet this contradiction — the space between what we do and what we know — is the space for art."