Deborah Drakeford and Christopher Allen in “Rockabye”, Photo by Sam Moffatt
There are two separate, very big ideas that propel Joanna Murray-Smith’s Rockabye and the urgency with which each is addressed is almost perfectly bifurcated by the act split. Satirical jabs at the capricious music industry abound in the first act’s comic set-ups. By the second act, though, shit gets real; the tone darkens around the thorny issue of rich, white celebrities adopting Black babies and, more broadly, the dubious motives and result of foreign aid to Africa.
It shouts its ideas very loudly through characters who feel less like people than action figures for social discourse. I absolutely believe style can be substance, that it can convey deep and resonant meaning, but the style here sometimes obscures the people the play is asking me to care about. ARC’s Canadian premiere of this inconsistent and bumpy play is an aesthetic triumph, truly; I fully appreciate director Rob Kempson’s carefully considered, slick and kinetic production.
Harkening back to aging rocker Sidney’s (Deborah Drakeford) glory days, Jackie Chau just kills it with the 80s pop vibes of her design. Contrasting colours gleam and are echoed in costumes, furniture and props. Martini glasses and water bottles look like candy, modular chairs extend or collapse for the needs of each scene. Looming above all, the centrepiece, is a massive quadriptych silkscreen portrait of the singer. Lending all a garish MTV sheen, Jareth Li illuminates the tacky Warhol-esque fixture from behind. A bank of lights aimed straight at the audience are used to blinding effect in scene transitions that play out like rock concert spectacle.
These vibrant visuals pair nicely with the rapid-fire banter of the first half. Sidney has a fraught dynamic with her entourage—intrepid assistant Julia (Julie Lumsden), her mercenary, much aggrieved manager Alfie (Sergio Di Zio), older yet still frisky cook Esme (Kyra Harper) and manic industry drop-out boy-toy, Jolyon (Nabil Traboulsi). Thrown into the frantic atmosphere surrounding Sidney’s desperate, overly strategized come-back album are: esteemed music journalist Tobias Beresford (Christopher Allen) and a conflicted adoption liaison Layla (Shauna Thompson).
Beresford’s public opinion, it seems, could make or break Sidney’s last-ditch effort to retain cultural relevance. He charms his way into a juicy secret—her late stage maternal yearning and her application to adopt an African orphan. Triggered, his backstory comes blazing to the surface as he vehemently opposes her efforts. In one of the most compelling relationships of the story, his romantic entanglement with Layla is both enhanced and aggravated by their shared African heritage.
Allen and Thompson have some intense scenes together as Beresford and Layla wrestle with notions of the West’s impact on their homeland—tokenism, platitudes, virtue signaling and rusting mountains of unneeded computers. And, yes, some genuine compassion too. The plea for imagination in the plotting of Africa’s future is quite resonant and I couldn’t help but notice the spectre of Wakanda creep into the fringes of this evolving discussion.
There are some very colourful accents and the ensemble’s affected personae feel thematically deliberate. Traboulsi’s Jolyon is an especially flamboyant figure, offering up an obnoxious performance art facade I found rather irritating; his emphatic, oddly vulnerable spiel about Das Boot, though, blindsided me into some affection for him. As I found myself struggling to care for these people, there are many such stirring little bursts of truth that won me over.
The peak for me is Beresford’s on-air interview with Sidney in which he confronts her directly as a white, wealthy celebrity fetishizing an African child. Taken aback by his awareness and the accusation, she defends herself. Allen and Drakeford are absolutely riveting here, an electric tension mounts as they negotiate clashing ideologies and try to maintain some decorum.
From this point on, though, the relatively naturalistic style of the scenes gives way to didactic, uncomfortably abstracted interactions between pairings of characters as they monologue at each other about what’s wrong with the world. The stand and deliver pattern gets tiresome. If there was some evocative beauty to the language, it could be quite arresting, but the writing and staging of these later scenes is pretty mundane.
There’s a lot of intriguing stuff to unpack here: how society positions aging female celebrities, the complicated moral enterprise of foreign aid, the compounded pressures of public posturing and personal integrity. I just don’t find the play consistently persuasive. The whole cast and creative team are giving it their all, but the impact is ultimately spotty.
Rockabye
running January 26 to February 11, 2024
Factory Theatre, Mainspace (125 Bathurst Street)
running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes (including intermission)
Julie Lumsden and Nabil Traboulsi in “Rockabye” Photo by Sam Moffatt