I didn’t really have a comment about the tattoos. Kevin Jackson did.
http://kjtheatrereviews.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/strange-interlude.html

I also wonder if there could have been a scene included where Nina is older/elderly and having a shower – I’m sure I would have “bought” the transformational “acting.”

However, I do think that, in the second half, the gravity of her maturity is weighing on her (but having said that, I also don’t think she has as much of the text as she did in the first half – a lot of the energy of the second half seems to live with Schmitz, Truslove and whichever boy is playing her son). This could be another case of Stone’s restructuring and streamlining of the play meaning that characters who had a definate function in the story lose focus (the way that, for instance, Gregers went missing in the second half of “The Wild Duck” in a way he doesn’t in Ibsen’s original).

I guess also that my use of the words ‘innovative’ and ‘edgy’ came from a conservative point of view then. No matter how O’Neillian Stone’s version is – it is not O’Neill. The script is momentously far from O’Neil’s, not just in its vernacular, but in it’s structure. The second half of the play in particular is a different entity altogether. I read somewhere that the ending was only formulated a couple of days before the first preview. It’s risky! – the process that this play obviously took from conception to production, and I think it’s very exciting. But maybe to be classified as ‘edgy’ in 2012, theatre requires a little more Butoh, a more physical dialect, and a german techno score, and a script written in prose to be interpreted as the director as he pleases, to be hailed as innovative.

Thanks for your thoughts.

I know there are plenty of punters and critics who agree with you about Emily Barclay’s performance. I respectfully disagree – in a play which is about “the roles we play” – if felt just like another role to me – not a transformation.

I do think her 20 year old Nina was very convincing – but a mature, wise, well-worn Nina seemed still decades away from Barclay.

I suppose I’m echoing the same emotional, clinical numbness I felt watching this production.

The question for me is really – is this a theme, idea portrayed by characters we are meant to feel/be emotional for? And if so, to what end. To prove we all are optimists/romantics? To soothe the terror of the practicality of relationships? Why must we feel something in the theatre? Don’t we have enough feeling in our daily lives – is it not enough to be fascinated or intellectually stimulated? And as Stone mentions in his directors note – what is the duty of entertainment?

I didn’t at all find this production in anyway “edgy” or “innovative” – in fact it is a very classical and conservative piece of theatre. Perhaps my wanderings through the dark and surprising landscapes at PACT, Shopfront, Performance Space and Carriageworks has informed this opinion? Very conservative – linear presentation using brechtian story-telling techniques and a meyerhold inspired stage movement. Old school. No blasting of narrative – or text – music and lights are supportive. The design is over-layed leading us to suspect that the drama of people’s lives is like that of a film? Not an interesting or new idea, for me. Plays within plays, films within plays, plays within films are aplenty. After all Shakespeare said All the Worlds a stage…

I’m still tutning this production around in my head.

And I think I will for a very long time. There are problems I have with it – there are moments I felt connected, entertained (but never surprised). And had I not the expectation of writing about it – I think I would have ruminated on this for another week before writing anything.

So, I guess, you could say – it is a successful piece of theatre.

I’ll always like theatre that’s conscious of itself. So I enjoyed the transitions, and the obvious displays of stage craft. Toby Schmitz pushing a light around in a Def Leppard t-shirt? Humorous. Makes the process of acting exactly that – a process. Schmitz playing an actor playing Ned. I like it. Although, I couldn’t help feel bad for Phelan and McQuade, who, restricted to one scene each spent MOST of their time handling cords, pieces of deck and a shower.
Overall, I sat there mostly uninvolved and entirely removed from the story (was that Stone’s purpose). I liked the characters, they made me laugh, I guess I believed what they were saying, but I didn’t really care what was happening to them. Truslove may be the exception to this, at least in the first act. I felt genuinely bad for him, and the end of the first half had me cringing. I might’ve been underwhelmed if not for the final scene. I left the theatre optimistic, in a very strange way.