B4 25 Playmarket Award nominee Ben Wilson has been inspired by seeing “young people’s stories told honestly,” and while I don’t buy the authenticity of the issues addressed in his play, “I’ll Be Fine”, the pre quarter-life crisis generation is a terrifying truth to which I’ve been exposed. The film obsessed potential scriptwriter role in which Wilson has written himself, aside from being painfully common territory for young aspiring writers, is so meta-theatrical it almost collapses in on its own awareness. 

A multi-character two-hander, Wilson and James Russell as Brian and Jude respectively, are immediately identifiable as the stereotypical lads of the road trip trope, but due to their combined lack of vocal articulation and basic stagecraft, the classic odd couple dynamic seems more accidental than earned, and while there is an obvious pace to Wilson’s dialogue, it can’t come at the expense of not being heard. [More]

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No one in a play or movie who goes on a road trip ever goes for the hell of it; there’s always an important discovery to be made, not about the trip but about the trip through life so far.

Ben Wilson dives head first into these well chartered waters in his first two-hander play with a couple of mates, Jude and Brian, leaving behind their misspent youthful lives in the fleshpots of Courtenay Place. Jude decides he wants to track down his biological father who lives somewhere up north.

Brian, in an amusing performance by the playwright who rattles away at great speed like a Kiwi Woody Allen on speed, sports a Brando t-shirt and is into movies in a big way. He dreams of writing a film script which will probably end up as something that might be called Fear and Loathing in Wellington.

Jude, given a solid performance by James Russell, is a more sensitive, thoughtful, level-headed bloke but puts up cheerfully with his mate’s more cynical approach to life. However, he does carry some heavy emotional baggage about his girlfriend Sarah, which is revealed rather clumsily to the audience well into the play, when it is also revealed that Brian is covering up some hidden fears.

The climax of the play comes all in a rush but there is some good comedy and astute observations of life in this city and the suburbs throughout despite a feeling towards the end that an important message has to be relayed. 

The setting is simple and effective but if one hangs a rope ladder and a child’s swing on the stage they really ought to be used, like Chekhov’s rule about guns on stage.

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Playwright Ben Wilson is quick to declare his inspirations for this his first play were Eli Kent’s The Intricate Art of Actually Caring (which he saw) and Vivienne Plumb’s The Cape (which he read). He and Script Supervisor /Director Ryan Knighton have assembled many of the potentially potent ingredients of both ‘road trip’ plays and put them together in their own way without really understanding how those particular recipes work in principle to produce compelling performance.

As Set, Sound and Lighting Designer and Operator, as well as Director, Ryan Knighton has attended well to the look and mechanics of the production. Amid the many scattered objects to be used, or not, as the play proceeds, the obligatory teenage slacker’s sofa serves multiple functions, a picket fence locates them in suburbia, a rope ladder and a swing intrigue as we ponder how they may be used. The space, including the auditorium, will be effectively utilised over the hour – except that the swing and the ladder turn out to be decoration only.

Best mates Jude (James Russell), named for his mother’s favourite Beatle’s song, and Brian (Ben Wilson) are stuck in post-High School /pre-‘Real Life’ limbo. They readily admit to the middle-class privilege that allows them to ‘blob’ while wondering what to do with their lives and even feel pissed off that they “have nothing to fight for”. (It seems such issues as global warming, the global corporatisation of national economies, cyber-threats to personal privacy and the resurgence of religious warfare don’t register at all, let alone overwhelm them, which could motivate their stasis even more.)

Hyper yet inactive motor-mouth Brian (somewhat redolent of The Cape’s Eb, first played by Eli Kent) has a head full of film trivia and claims to be working on his “brilliant screenplay”. It is the quieter Jude, somewhat lost in the wake of a failed relationship with Sarah, who gets them off their bums and off on a quest to find his biological father.  

En-route we meet a drug dealer contact, an ex-school acquaintance serving petrol, a grumpy Grandad … As various bits of backstory also emerge from the welter of words, including an evocation of dissolution in Courtenay Place, it’s hard to know what to retain in case it’s relevant to whatever’s to come.

Some things confuse more than clarify. For example they seem to start out with no money and get away without paying for drugs or petrol (yeah right) yet have plenty of booze and presumably buy food. Brian mentions a sister called Alice and says something about going to their Dad’s place because their Mum gone down to Christchurch, which seems to suggest the parents are separated, but later he says they are going to take him and Alice on an overseas trip which seems to suggest they’re together. The car breaks down at the side of the road but we never find out what’s wrong with it or how it get fixed.

Most importantly, two major events emerge, one about Alice and the other about Sarah, which I won’t divulge here except to say regret and guilt must be festering deep within these boys and need to surface more effectively within the play. To put it bluntly, despite the assemblage of promising ingredients, what the play and production lack most is actual in-the-moment drama. We are told shocking things but there is no dramatic impact in their discovery by us, and no apparent drama in – or dramatic insight into – how they are affecting Jude and Brian.

Performance conventions are somewhat mashed up too and not well integrated. We get narration that locates some bits of the story but no other direct address; there are some relatively stylised riffs on themes such as conception; a dream sequence manifests fears about how the biological father will react …

There is no doubt Wilson is in tune with his generation. He has a good ear for how they speak and there is lots of wit in his characters’ utterances. He and Russell bring Brian and Jude to life with great vitality, Russell inhabiting his role more convincingly while Wilson tends to demonstrate his. But there is much more to creating the ‘chemical change’ that good playwriting involves. Likewise Knighton’s directing shows promise but there is much more to be learned about modulating performances to best effect and allowing subtext to surface.

That said, their opening night audience was highly supportive, laughed uproariously at many points and some gave them a standing ovation. Bats is certainly to be congratulated for giving them space to learn by doing and it’s good to know they are well supported in their endeavours.

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