Armour, presented by 610 Productions, is the latest work from writer and director Tom Jeffcote and the second production in the current season at The Blue Room Theatre. The premise was a promising one; four men go into the wilderness and talk about their feelings. Unfortunately, Armour failed to live up to this early promise, and I left the theatre feeling frustrated, really quite disappointed and that a really great opportunity had been squandered.
I should point out that I was for the most part entertained throughout the performance, there were some funny moments throughout – though there were more than a few moments where I found myself alone (or at the very least in the minority) in my bemusement – which was definitely awkward.
One of my biggest problems with the play were the characters; the problem being exactly that – they were characters. At no point did I feel like these four men could have been real believable people as opposed to walking clichés. They were all stereotypes, right down to their costume choices. I mean a washed up womanising alcoholic rock star? Isn’t it time we put that character to bed for a little while?
The Ex-SAS soldier seemed to me to be included as a way to talk about or at least reference PTSD, but it barely featured, instead the character became a way of lightening the “mood” interjecting one-liners and off topic comments to distract the others from their fights – of which there were at least one too many. Of the four characters Mawkie (Danen Engelenberg) was perhaps the most interesting thanks to his relationship with his recently deceased friend Tanner, but this went largely unexplored and his character largely undeveloped.
Part of the problem for me was that we only got to see one session; personally I would have preferred to see these characters relationships develop over a longer period of time, perhaps over the course of a handful of sessions. That way we could have seen that Robbie (Ben Weirheim) was first at every session, rather than be told it. We could have witnessed Mawkie and Tanner’s relationship and concurrently actually garner some attachment to Tanner as a character so his eventually death actually has some impact.
Setting the play over a prolonged time period perhaps might have allowed us the audience to care about these characters a bit more, and give all involved a chance to explore more deeply the dynamics of a group like this. At the very least it would mean that the writer could have done more showing than telling.
The play also ultimately felt too long, at a run time of about 90 minutes, Armour really pushed the limits of my patience. I’m happy to watch longer works; but Armour didn’t really feel like it was going anywhere, rather it seemed to endlessly revisit points it had already made, or heap more misery onto it’s characters without providing any resolution; it almost became as Neil (Matthew Kiely) suggested “an endless exercise”. The play was also injected with needless tension with the inclusion of the drunk “Roo Hunters”. As a sub plot it seemed to me completely un-necessary and a hastily constructed and unbelievable way of keeping these characters together.
At the end of the day Armour was entertaining enough; my problem was that it could have been so much more. On the front page of the program is the question “Can men really talk about their feelings?” ultimately I felt like that Armour never really provided a satisfactory answer to that question; at the very least it didn’t offer an answer of any real substance; nor did it live up to my expectations or the promise of its premise.
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Armour plays at Perth’s Blue Room Theatre until May 9th. For more information and tickets please visit: http://blueroom.org.au/events/armour
The reviewer attended opening night on April 23rd
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