It’s not an uncommon story: big business/progress/industry comes to a small town and things change. Some people ride the sparkling wave of opportunity and prosperity and others are left behind. The play Sepia is not about anything new or groundbreaking, but it portrays this frequently occurring struggle with honesty and heart.
Neil is a cuttle-fisherman in the town of Whyalla. The government has just approved a uranium mine in the area which requires a desalination plant to provide the mine with water, and the brine from the plant is to be pumped into the stretch of ocean that is also the mating area of the cuttlefish. The owners of the plant say it will have no effect on the fish, but Neil knows better – and he’s not happy about it.
The play opens with Neil, sitting regally in an arm chair, dressed in a wetsuit, mask and flippers (or, rather, “Fins. Flipper is the dolphin.”) When he talks about cuttlefish his face is light and the outfit doesn’t seem so ridiculous. A beautiful dreamy montage of the fish pulsing through the water helps keep him soft and replays throughout.
But when the lights go up and his son and ex-wife enter the room, he becomes just a sad middle-aged man who won’t take off his wetsuit. The sudden change is palpable, the room thick with unsaid things, embarrassments and wounded pride. The majority of the play is stark, raw, full of long silences and barely controlled tempers.
We learn, back-to-front, how Neil came to be sitting despondent and wet-suit clad in his lounge room. This is a regular-person kind of story: Neil had big ambitions for his caravan park and cuttle fishing business which do not sit so well with his wife Emma; she had big ambitions for business school and an accounting job five hours away that do not sit so well with Neil; their son is just sick of all their fighting.
In the end, the desalination plant becomes the enemy onto which Neil vents all his pent up frustrations and failed ambitions, despite his family’s lack of empathy. Neil is imbued with an incredibly compelling and heart-wrenching desperation and a childish sense of it not being fair, yet he is totally paralysed in his indignation and your heart goes out to this ‘Average Joe’ turned environmentalist, who never seems to get things right.
Occasionally some of the interactions were a little too drawn out, and a few of the scene changes were slightly clumsy. The son character was perhaps a little bit cliched in its representations of apathetic Gen Y, but otherwise the characters were very convincing – especially Neil, with his red-faced anguish and frustrations that left you feeling as hopeless as he was.
Although the play ends on a sunny, happy note, Sepia is a story of lost hope - a sad, regular little story about how, when faced with the choice between making a profit and protecting the world around us, “We always choose making a profit.”
Sepia has finished its run at the Fringe Festival.
