Review: Poor Boy

Poor Boy
Sydney Theatre
Until 1 August
Tickets $30-80
Bookings (02) 9250 1777
Critic’s Rating 5/10


Basing a play around the songwriting beauty of Tim Finn in his Split Enz days is as much inspiring as it is daunting.

Playwright Matt Cameron has taken the challenge in an attempt to dramatise both the famous and not-so-famous ballads that will be familiar to an entire generation of Australians and New Zealanders who remember the musical glory days of the '80s.

With a stereotypical Australian family setting, we are greeted by a backyard under a vast sky. There’s a clothes line, unruly weeds, a swing and a two-storey fibro-like house.

Sol (Greg Stone) and Viv (Linda Cropper) are the parents of Jeremy (Nicholas Bakopoulos-Cooke) a seven-year-old who has just been hit by a car at zebra crossing. On waking, he denies they are his family and seeks out the moribund home of Ruth (Sarah Pierse) who seven years previously lost her son Danny (Matthew Newton) in a horrific car accident.

In a world where The Sixth Sense meets Birth, Jeremy comes from the other side, reincarnated as the character of Danny and scaring the life out of Ruth, her son Miles (Matt Dyktynski) and her grieving daughter-in-law Clare (Abi Tucker).

Jeremy knows the ins and outs of the family’s history – where they went for family holidays, what the name of his favourite zebra mask was and the intimate life Danny had with Clare.

It’s a fantastical premise to frame Finn's beautiful songs but that’s about as far as it goes.

Fitting a set design, characters and a plot line onto an array of songs written nearly 30 years ago creates a world that lacks believability. This is particularly apparent during scenes between the two mothers, where little time is afforded to the angst Viv faces in letting her seven-year-old boy go to another family.

But if you are a fan of Finn and Split Enz, this will be an interesting expedition. Under the musical direction of Ian McDonald, the songs are much more raw than their recorded variations and have been theatrically ramped up, softening their more folksy tones.

It’s when the actors gather together in chorus, belting out the tunes that you can see why the idea to frame them into a play came about. But the direction and design seek a nostalgia that has no anchor and dramatically it never manages to reach the height of Finn’s wonderful score.