Ruben Guthrie
Belvoir Downstairs
******
By Jason Catlett
Ruben Guthrie will be the funniest serious investigation of alcohol you'll ever experience - unless you happen to be a supremely witty dipsomaniac wunderkind like Ruben. Brendan Cowell's new play wins the trifecta: it's great entertainment, cutting social criticism, and quality literature.
Ruben's monologue on his lost and putrid weekend is, for example, as funny as anything in David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and all the better because Guthrie is not bragging about frontier adventurism, but rather confessing with embarrassment his sense of helplessness in the face of Sydney's abundant hedonistic opportunities. We are simultaneously thrilled, struck with self-recognition, and chilled by the dangers.
Success on stage depends on the skill of director Wayne Blair and Toby Schmitz, whose dynamic voice and agile face transparently convey the wide emotional compass of an alcoholic genius, swinging from easy charm to cruel rebuff to desperate neediness. It wouldn't be wrong to say that Guthrie is the perfect vehicle for Schmitz, or that Schmitz is perfectly cast as Guthrie, though either would under-rate them both.
The plot proceeds largely as a sequence of booze-toting interventions by Ruben's friends, family and his barbed-wire-sharp boss, played with Mephistophelian intensity by Christopher Stollery. The ad executive ruthlessly extracts the work product he needs, despite Ruben's protest "I can't sell beer in the headspace I'm in."
Ruben's creativity is used to foist on an entire nation the chemical that is sending him to rock bottom - though nobody pounds the point. The only preachy speech, made doubly difficult through a Czech accent, is given by his swimsuit model girlfriend Zoya (Sam Reed): why do Australians drink themselves into oblivion when there is so much beauty around them? Her confrontation with Ruben's AA sponsor turned girlfriend Virginia (Megan Drury) surpasses the cringing depths of Fawlty Towers, and makes a point beyond farce: the cure for alcoholism can be worse than the disease. The supporting cast of unsupportive characters bearing liquid temptation is strong, most prominently Lex Marinos as the heavy drinking dad.
Everyone will love the non-stop comedy and shimmering dialogue, but those who have known a talented alcoholic or the spell of addiction will feel the tragedy more personally: the drama of Ruben Guthrie is, first, last, and always: to drink or not to drink? In the final scene, just as in Hamlet, that is the question: is he going to take the poison? After the applause finally stops, your peer group picks up the segue: how about swinging by the bar to discuss the play's big social issues and best lines, over a dose of our national drug? "Red or white?" Here's to Ruben: cheers!
