Claire Loveri in Tim Wintons, Rising Water

Tim Winton’s prose has regularly been adapted for the stage and for a mixed audience such as Spare Parts Puppet Theatre’s The Bugalugs Bum Thief (1998) and Company B Belvoir and Black Swan Theatre’s Cloud Street (1999). Naturally, a stage play written by Winton is going to create certain expectations from Australia’s theatre going public.

Rising Water taps into a small and relatively unknown community with all its rawness – as John Howard’s character Baxter exclaims, “The sea gives up its dead eventually”.

Rising Water is set during Australia Day in a Fremantle marina. The play’s characters have a palpable Western Australian and colloquial-type Winton dialogue. The production explores a marginal community of live-a-boards with Jackie (Alison Whyte) occupying the yacht Mercy, Col (Geoff Kelso) in his boat Goodness and Baxter (John Howard) living between them in his messy sloop, Shirley. During the noisy celebrations of Australia Day, which is riddled with intoxicated by-passers such as an English backpacker who is extremely rowdy and loud, Col, Baxter and Jackie embark on a cleansing of past wrongs while discovering the possibility of a better future.

The set, designed by Christina Smith, is truly awesome in all its gala and verisimilitude. Each boat has a diverse appearance that matches the characters who reside in them. The three floating boats shift and quack, depicting and illustrating a small slice of marina life. Interestingly, all three boats are without a rudder further emphasising the dichotomy between freedom and entrapment.

The comedic performance from Geoff Kelso who portrays Col was refreshing and one of his many lines such as, “where there is a will there are relatives” was very funny, assisting the show’s often slow pace. Alison Whyte’s characterisation of Jackie the “tea teetotaler” was subtle, intense and slightly hypersensitive. John Howard took a bit of time to warm up and seemed to have more control over his character (Baxter) both in body and voice by the second half. I was a little put-off by Claire Lovering’s backpacker character Dee; with her exaggerated and high pitched cockney accent. However, Lovering’s performance was much stronger by the second half too.

One of my favourite parts in Rising Water was the visual and physical drowning scene of Dee (Lovering) and watching the “imaginary” boy (played by Kai Arbuckle) as he swam down to rescue her. Moreover, the use of intense and atmospheric lighting (designed by Matt Scott), the sound scape (by Iain Grandage) which reflected Australia Day’s celebratory mood effectively as well as the actors being hoisted by ropes and swimming in the air, kept me entertained.

Overall, however I’m not completely convinced that Rising Water meets the needs of a savvy theatre going audience. At times, I felt that the actors were performing from a fiction/narrative-type text that had been forced into a play, and I was weighed down by the continual and heavy dialogue with little action and a weak plot line. For me, the anguish and emotional turmoil that each character journeyed through did not necessarily match the secrets they held.

Essentially, Rising Water is Winton’s first play and it would be rather unfair to ignore this particular point. As Jonathan Levy in Theatre of the Imagination (1987) states, ‘when a playwright imagines a play, he imagines not only the play but the audience for it.’

However, there is a massive difference between writing fiction for a readership and writing a play for a live audience.

Reviewer: Rachael Hains-Wesson

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