What would it look like if we gathered a few people from central areas of your life and got to know you through the window of their one-sided interactions with you, and their subsequent reactions to those interactions? Got all that? That’s what this piece is.
The Things I Could Never Tell Steven is an ambitious small-cast piece of musical comedy created by playwright Jye Bryant. Set in the eighties, the story has Steven’s discovery of his queer identity at its core. Steven’s dishonesty and struggles are revealed through the contrasting narratives of his Mother (Helen Dallimore), Father (Ian Stenlake), Girlfriend (Elenoa Rokobaro) and Ex-Boyfriend (Adam Rennie).
Presented mostly through a series of vignettes, the contrast between lies and truths find definition, as the characters share their enchantment and attachment to Steven with the audience. Over the journey of the story the characters are gradually overcome by confusion and pain as the weight of the lies that they don’t know hurts them.
The National Theatre of Parramatta has never fails to impress in terms of its creative design. Set and Costume Designer James Browne assisted by Anthony Makhlouf, has taken the multiuse space of the Lennox Theatre and the challenge of presenting a hybrid event (in-person and streamed), and used it as an opportunity to heighten the creative vision of the space rather than succumbing to the challenging realities of producing theatre in 2020. The colourful set makes use of the vertical space by creating four ascending rooms for the four characters to inhabit, as well as a central platform for the live on-stage Musician. The rooms are all differentiated by contrasting bright colours and styles that are gaudy by today’s standards and too perfect in a way that doesn’t shy away from the fact that it is the scenery of a musical that is intentionally overt. Not to mention the characters are wearing outfits that match their rooms—80s chic!
The cast was tight, convincing and well-rehearsed. The only thing that took me out of the world of the musical was the vocal prowess of Elenoa Rokobaro. Although Rokobaro showed considerable restraint throughout the show, her voice often outshone her fellow cast members both in power and texture. This was no means a negative to her cast mates who were well developed as characters with strong beautiful voice, it was just the nature of this format of small-cast musical that moved from vignette to vignette, which invited easy comparison between each room.
The show was successful in terms of storytelling. There are no standout musical numbers within the show, but I don’t believe that this was Jye Bryant’s intention. It was a thoughtful experience to look at someone’s journey of their sexual identity through the eyes of the others engagement with that person. Bryant said in his statement that he was exploring the cliché of ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you.’ The Things I Could Never Tell Steven engages thoughtfully with this idea, prodding it for whatever truth it may contain. For me, it was the selfishness of Steven that was the lasting taste in the mouth of this reviewer, which is pretty impressive given the fact I never saw him.
Christina Donoghue, Theatre Now
