Director: Roy Sargeant
Cast: Johan Baird, Alex Halligey, Francesco Nassimbeni, Adrienne Pearce, David Johnson
Venue: Artscape Arena until November 5
Simon Lyndsay was the boy who fell from a steep roof with all his baggage and was killed. The baggage was emotional but it was the physicality of the fall that killed him. Did he fall - or was he pushed? Go figure.
Those closest to him go into a series of flashbacks as young playwright Juliet Jenkin tries to show what made 18-year-old Simon tick.
Meet his emotionally shattered mother, Patricia, his best friend, Georgina, a doting fag-hag, and his lover, the 25-year-old Leonard Jackson, an egg-head mathematician.
Jenkin's play deals - with occasionally too much verbosity - with lingering issues from the old South Africa: homosexuality in the middle-class white family and gay relationships across the colour line. While she is better at delving into the former, she is less successful with the latter.
But Jenkin must be congratulated and encouraged for raising these issues so intelligently. It is a pity, though, that she ensconced much of it in a general wordiness.
A highlight - and simultaneously a problem - of Jenkin's writing is the strongly written Simon character and the superb performance by Francesco Nassimbeni who plays him. It merely exposes the paucity of Jenkin's writing of the other characters and the lesser performances of the actors playing them.
The next best-written character is Simon's best friend, Georgina, but the balance isn't strong enough, though Alex Halligey works hard. Jenkin, giving Simon dialogue of often deliciously sardonic wit, lets him run away with all their scenes. Same goes for Simon's scenes with his older Coloured lover, Leonard. David Johnson works hard at trying to bolster the character.
Adrienne Pearce, a very able actress of whom far too little is seen, takes the underwritten role of Simon's mother.
The role of a chorus/narrator, played gamely by Johan Baird, is unnecessary and extraneous. The information in this role and the mother could have been absorbed into the dialogue of the others.
Jenkin's play, part of the Artscape Spring Drama Season, has drawn no less a theatre figure than Roy Sergeant to direct it, and he has made it a success.