Review: The Dark Room (Theatre503)

As Australia opts to legalise same-sex marriage – decisively so – Angela Betzien’s eerie 2009 play gains a certain superficial timeliness. It taps into things Australia has long repressed – though that’s by no means limited to sexuality.

The Dark Room is crowded. Set in a standardised motel room – or maybe several – it layers up three roadside encounters. Characters glide past each other like ghosts, arguing over one another’s heads. A forlorn cop chugs whisky at the end of a bed as a couple rolls around in the sheets. A child, skin scratched and stained with dirt, curls up in the corner. It takes some picking apart, but the effect is mysterious, spectral and sinister.

In one, a teenage girl, Grace (Annabel Smith) is picked up by a child protection officer. She’s febrile, hiding her face beneath a makeshift dog mask fashioned from a soiled pillowcase, and she lashes out, verbally and violently, at her new carer – or is Anni (Katy Brittain) a warder? Either way, there’s a suspicion of something darker, that Grace may still not be safe, even as she rails and spits and gnashes her teeth.

In another, a couple – a pissed, off-duty policeman and his pregnant partner – return from a wedding, bickering to the very edge of boiling over into either violence or lust. Between them, elsewhere, the lone policeman sinks whiskies and wallows, while this ghostly figure of a young black boy in a white wedding dress, his eyes red-raw, materialises like a memory glitch.

It’s the equivalent of multiple exposure in photography: several images superimposed on top of one another. As The Dark Room develops, the full picture slowly comes into view. We gradually grow into an understanding of how these three separate scenes interrelate; what lurks beneath the surface not just of these people’s lives, but of a small, outback community. A young, queer Aborigine has died in police custody, and all of them are haunted by memories of him – after-images, really. They can’t shake off the things they’ve seen or done.

Betzien handles the form beautifully, as scenes lap at each other and refuse to cohere. For a long while, unsettlingly, it’s impossible to piece it together. People sober up from one room to the next, sunflowers appear out of nowhere. What we initially perceive as a layering up of locations turns out to be a trick played with time: one room, different moments – all of them entangled by one unlawful death.

It spares no one in that, least of all a culture of toxic masculinity, fuelled by booze and testosterone. This is a town that lives by the motto ‘Drink cement, harden up,’ but it’s women and children that suffer as a result. In every scene here, someone’s unfeasibly vulnerable – children, abused and unborn – and you find yourself bracing for some kind of tragedy long before several pile up at once.

True, Betzien overdoes the trappings of darkness, with bloody hearts and bite marks scattered throughout, and The Dark Room risks sensationalising sensitive issues. Child abuse thriller and race death horror are far from good looks, and director Audrey Sheffield doesn’t help with a furious start that leaves nowhere to go and forces actors to fray beyond credibility.

The Dark Room runs at Theatre503 until 2 December.