Grief over the death of a loved one is never easy to handle but when the death involves a child it becomes almost unbearable.

That is the case in Rabbit Hole, David Lindsay-Abaire’s heart-wrenching and painful expose of a couple’s grief over the death of their 4 year old son, Danny in Backyard Theatre’s current production playing at the Gryphon Theatre.

Trying to get back to a life of normality is Becca (Rebecca Parker) and Howie (Joel Allen) eight months after Danny was run over and kill by a car outside their house. All they now have are the memories. But as Becca tries to put away the reminders like toys and pictures Howie wants them kept and watches videos of Danny outside playing. 

So the seething, underlying rage of guilt and recriminations play out between the two not helped by sister Izzy (Emma Draper) declaring she is pregnant and mother Nat (Jade Valour) going on about how she coped when their brother died. The young school boy driving the car in the fatal accident Jason (Connor Slattery) is also involved as a way of trying to bring closure to the incident. 

What could be an overly written and over wrought play acted out overdramatically is not. It gets to the heart of the subject matter with tight uncompressing dialogue that is both painfully real yet tinged with hope rather than despair. 

This production, under the direction of Tanya Piejus, does more than justice to the script in a well balanced production that avoids sentimentality and never allows the play to wallow in a mire of emotional angst. The portrayals of all the charters are real and believable, totally focused and grounded without ever wearing their hearts on their sleeve. The pace is snappy and naturalistic and while some momentum is lost through the quieter parts towards the end the final uplifting moments brings the play to a satisfying conclusion.

As the wife Becca, Rebecca Parker is superb, walking a tight rope of just holding it in but always on the brink of breaking down through meaningful pauses and gestures. When she finally does break near the end, while heartfelt, it is well controlled. 

She is well supported by Joel Allen as Howie her husband, and while his way of dealing with his grief could be considered stereotypically male, his inability to understand his wife is real and believable. 

Emma Draper as the sister and Jade Valour as the mother both provide excellent counterpoints to the increasing tension in the household and Connor Slattery does well as the young driver Jason trying to show his remorsefulness in a drama that is well worth seeing.
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Reading the synopsis of American playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole makes you wonder why any theatre company would choose to stage a play that centres so uncomfortably around grief; a play that presents the dark, despairing side of family drama, and doesn’t justify its need for an audience. The controversial theatre-as-entertainment issue comes out to play.

The story follows a married couple who lost their 4-year-old son to a car when he ran onto the road after his dog, less than a year before the play’s setting. The couple struggle to cope with their grief, spend most of their time being belligerent and passive aggressive to each other, family members and strangers alike, and there is only a vague whiff of progress at the end of the play. Catharsis is an ancient Greek word. It has no place in this play, and is one of the few words the husband character Howie (played by Joel Allen, whose performance is committed – if sometimes a little exaggerated) probably wouldn’t look up in his dictionary – one of his many forms of escapism. 

Theatre making is surely challenging enough without taking on a playtext that relies upon the audience relating emotionally to the situation (and therefore on gripping performances to boot). Nonetheless, Backyard Productions’ presentation of this play is not all grim and bleak. There are a few performances that add relateablility and a very real flush in the cheeks to the pallor of this play.

Izzy, the misguided 20-something who has to inform her grief-stricken sister that she is pregnant, is played with much-needed humour, charm and energy by Emma Draper (watch this space). Another very promising youngster on stage is the 14 year old Connor Slattery, in the role of Jason – the teenager who accidentally killed Danny. Slattery has a small role in the play, but his performance is very genuine and touching.

Rebecca Parker has a difficult task in the lead role of Becca (the bereaved mother), portraying a character who is so passive aggressive towards everyone around her that it is difficult to remember or care that she is suffering from grief. The performance is largely internalised and we only are presented with a thin veneer of her personality. Parker’s performance seems more suited to TV Drama than to live theatre, with its internalisation and lack of visible grit. If she were handling raw steaks on stage rather than so many lemon tarts, she might have been less bitter and more gutsy, perhaps.

Jade Valour plays the stereotyped tipsy, waffling, ‘don’t-I-know-it’ mother (to Becca and Izzy) who tries to help haul her daughter back into the living world. Valour’s performance is to-a-tee, but it feels like she has been plucked out of another play down the road. She is the only character with an eastern American Jewish accent.

Director Tanya Piejus must have decided that this would work, as long as we assume she is an immigrant who brought her children up in New Zealand. The play is clearly set in ‘the Hutt’, north of Wellington, with dialogue being adapted to include ‘Trademe’ references and Howie’s risk management job with ‘State Insurance’. However, the pieces of the puzzle – particularly this mother character – really don’t fit together.

Aside from her accent – which is much better suited to the style, dialogue and content of the play (it’s clearly an American play and not a Kiwi one, or call it ‘universal’, but there’s universal American and universal Kiwi!), she’s rattling on about the Kennedys like she’s straight out of the Regan era. She would have been well cast in Kushner’s Angels in America.

Then there’s the difficultly with placing these characters in terms of wealth and class. The characters and play should be clearly middle class, but are they? The mother dresses and speaks differently to the rest of the family, and the text and set don’t match. The characters talk about their ‘big, lovely house’, but the set presents a bit of a dump, furnished with what look like $1 reserve sofas from Trademe. A few changes to the set design and costumes would really help tie things together. Perhaps expectations of production values should be different for co-op theatre, but that’s another argument.

In the end, it is a moving play and performance, but with a few holes that could be mended; both in the set’s sofas and the parent’s hearts.
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