Theatre Review: The Man & The Moon

The Man And The Moon was part prose, part musical, part drama and wholly wonderful.

Picture smoke, a saxophone shining under the warm glow of the lights and whatever other indescribable things that create the essence of a New York jazz bar manifested in a Subiaco theatre, 18,000 km away. Then have this image shattered by Brett’s classic Australian suburbia: Coronas in the sun, a BBQ, and numerous uses of colloquial Australian lingo that aren’t quite modest enough for a play review. The work goes deeper than these humorous familiarities, peeling back the layers of a 9 to 5 job, the mundanity of the everyday and the way the daily grind can begin to grind something in us down with it - all juxtaposed against the whimsy of an interstellar lover and a taxi riding its way through the sky.

The imagery of St John Cowcher, (the works' lead and playwright) creates verbally is combined with a musical scale by Brett Smith that creates a living kind of prose. The work transports readers into the celestial sonnet until you cannot help but long for a similar kind of magic and yet, without spoiling the ending, remain content with a lack of it. There is a mutual understanding between everyone in the room, both on and off stage that there are certain kinds of magic that do exist, (theatre chief on the top of everyone’s list) and these are the remedies to our own ordinariness and are perfect in small, relieving doses that save us from the world, and remind us of actuality: it’s really not that bad down here.