Art Smitten: Reviews - 2016

The audience at La Mama Courthouse demanded encore bows from the cast of Rust and Bone on the night of its Victorian premiere performance, which they very humbly gave and most definitely deserved. Caleb Lewis’ three-pronged play asks a lot of its actors, and quite a bit from its audience as well. A trio of male performers - Luke Mulquiney, Adam Ibrahim and Glenn Maynard in this production - play out three of the stories from Craig Davidson's collection of the same title. Ibrahim plays a SeaWorld whale trainer whose leg was torn off by an Orca, Maynard a fading boxer in need of someone to fight for, and Mulquiney a crazed dog fighter who's struggling with his infertility. The narratives are all interspersed, such that Lewis needs to carefully choose when to switch from one to the next, director Daniel Clarke has to think carefully about how to transition between stories, and the actors have to be ready to change gears in an instant. As well as that, each of them needs to have the range to play all of the