The quests for engagement, connection, communication – if necessary through confrontation, provocation and/or shock – are ever-present in arts practice, and in life, and so it is with Kate Morris’s Sketch, directed by Eleanor Bishop.

As we enter and take our seats, a Japanese artist – Mami Sasaki (Sonia Yee) – appears to be going mad at her easel. Or this interaction with her (unseen by us) canvas is a highly stylised rendition of her inner turmoil. A phone call to her mum, however, offers a relatively realistic glimpse of art world politics but she’s not complaining, she’s not avoiding, she’s excited …

Sasaki’s plans change when a darkly hooded figure arrives with a stark request: “I want you to build me a room to die in.” (This much can be revealed because it’s the slug line on publicity.) A copy of a sketch – drawn by Saski when squatting in a damp Manhattan warehouse – reveals they have a past together. Initially resistant, Saski accepts the commission from the woman we will come to know as Nadi (Alex Lodge) – and right at the end we discover why.

Nadi’s reasons for seeing out her final days – or are they? – at this particular gallery, turn out to relate to her own deep-felt quest for engagement, connection and communication with … someone fundamentally important, who abandoned her.

Or maybe it’s just performance art. Or maybe she’s creating a spectacle on behalf of an environmental group called Weeping Willow with which she got involved at Otago University. Whichever way you look at it, she – along with the planet – needs her very existence to be acknowledged, validated and loved before it is irretrievably terminated. As it is in life, so it is in art.

But before this is revealed, differing value systems in appreciating art are played out in a high-energy scene between art curator-turned-dealer Steve Brinro (Paul McLaughlin) and property developer-turned-gallery-owner Bernard Tensing (Ralph Johnson), who (we discover later) embraced art after having a close encounter with a Kandinsky in London. He values art for its ability to distract him from himself and his life.

Brinro – author of I Know Why She’s Smiling and The Educated Eye Does Not Lie – has a more sophisticated take on it but both anticipate big earnings from Sasaki’s forthcoming show with interest being shown by international collectors with fat wallets. Her delicate paintings of idyllic and unattainable scenes glimpsed through cracks, keyholes, zips etc have won her distinction, fame and bankability. But why can she be heard sawing and hammering?  

Somewhat itinerant, late of NYC, Sasaki is in New Zealand on a nine-month residency with the Tensing Gallery, which is re-launching with her exhibition.

When Sasaki unveils her confrontational installation, entitled Venus Too (description below with spoiler alert*), the outrage is instant. Tensing and Binro fear their investments are at risk because she has not delivered to expectations. Their struggle to come to terms with it according to their respective value systems is intersected with highly stylised public reactions, Sasaki getting staggeringly drunk and the slow reveal of Nadi’s story.

The premise for the play is brilliant and I want to like the outcome more than I do. Having felt, on opening night, that too much shouting, the highly stylised interventions of ‘public opinion’ (where the wearing of spectacles is the only device to separate the actor from their ‘real’ characters) and the histrionic drunkenness of Sasaki (sustained at one level through two long scenes), had obscured my access to the substantive work, I went a second time. I needed to see past the broad brush strokes to better appreciate the detail.

The core story of abandonment – principally of a daughter abandoned by her father – is comically counterpointed by a neurotically controlling Goth called Mel (Rose Guise) whose high-school boyfriend Spencer (Te Aihe Butler) would love to be abandoned by her but fears she will carry out her threat to kill herself. While Mel is played out on one shouting level, offering no insight into the vulnerability she is presumably protecting herself from, Spencer’s fascination with Nadi and her response to his dilemma adds some welcome dramatic texture.

The supposedly highly influential art critic, Gunner Lee (Aidan Weekes), never expresses an opinion about the Venus Too installation. Instead he operates more as an investigative journalist, uncovering Nadi’s true identity, and quizzes people on their feelings about the work. Although he is softer than the shouters, he too comes across as more of a dramatic device than a real character.

Just back from a placement in a Tongan hospital, and coming at the father’s request, is her longest-lasting friend Alan (James Winter), who also has an abandonment story involving Nadi and her Dunedin student boyfriend. Alan is charged with discovering whether or not her alleged terminal condition is real. It’s very dramatic when he discovers one thing then tells Bernard, Brino and Sasaki the opposite but – given they way it all ends – I remain at a loss to understand why.

As for the father’s inability to finally engage with his daughter, I simply don’t buy that he cannot cope because she reminds him of her mother (who was killed in a home invasion, which led to him leaving Nadi with her grandparents in Napier while he got on with his business life). The back-story about her faking illnesses as a child to stop him leaving again has great dramatic value in setting up the present conundrum. I just don’t believe the outcome.

All the actors commit themselves whole heartedly to their roles and most have moments that draw us in to some level of empathy. In praising Alex Lodge’s superbly modulated performance as Nadi, I have to note that hers is the most fully-formed character and therefore the most credible, while the others may be somewhat compromised at certain points in order to comment on the themes and serve the needs of the plot. Or maybe it’s just that the playwright is content to judge them without understanding them.  

“We’ve explored the contrast between the huge, fast-paced, superficial art world,” writes director Eleanor Bishop on her programme note, “and the small pockets of stillness and intimacy within it.” And yes, the most compelling moments are the quieter ones, where Nadi communicates with Spencer and Alan, and where her father talks to her believing she is asleep.

But it is too big, too true and too good an idea not to be a full-length play where more characters are given the space to reveal the humanity beneath their carapaces. The programme asserts that a group of people “are profoundly changed” by the exhibition but what we see is Sasaki, the father, Mel and Spencer all revert to their status quo. Given the outcome for Nadi would have been the same, regardless, only the dealer, Steve Brinro, is changed significantly.

The nature of public reactions to the visual arts also deserve a greater range of exploration than all that posturing and shouting (cf: public reaction to Damien Hirst’s picked sheep, Tracey Emin’s unmade bed and – mentioned in the play to good effect – Guillermo ‘Habacuc’ Vargas’s starving dog).  

Alice Hill’s set of a dotted line floor plan allows the action to flow while we understand where people are and who is visible to whom, and the centrepiece (see below), once unveiled, is very compelling. Her costume designs, too, are just right.

The sound design by Thomas Press is also excellent although very loud bursts of song – e.g. the White Stripes ‘I just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’ at the end – seem to be telling us not to attempt to engage with the substance of the play, unless the thinking is that we will work harder at that if we have something to fight against.

I am sure there is some artspeak that could be employed to justify the mixing of styles and the disruptions to our desire to empathise and engage with the central human story. And hey, as Sasaki points out to Gunner Lee, I’m not the only critic in town. But I’d like to think this premiere season does not spell the end of its development.

Spoiler alert
*Venus Too is a sterile Perspex-walled room backed by a wall of pill bottles and with a chemical toilet in the corner, in which a slowly dying Nadi, clad in a beige kimono, lies on a rudimentary bed. The room only opens from the inside. Ends   
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Sketch is an admirably ambitious play and it has been given a well-mounted production by Eleanor Bishop and her designer, Alice Hill, and her sound and lighting designer, Thomas Press. Her eight actors all give strong, straightforward performances of familiar stereotypes of the fashionable art world.

The play takes place in the Tenzing Gallery in Wellington. A clichéd arty-farty crowd is attending an opening of a major new work by an up-and-coming artist, Sasaki (Sonia Yee), for whom the gallery owner (Ralph Johnson) and an art dealer (Paul McLaughlin) have great hopes, particularly as a wealthy American collector is said to be paying a visit because of the opening.

The new work is unveiled and it is clearly nothing like the artist’s previous work. It is an installation which at first glance seems to be a collaboration between Tracey Emin and Damien Hurst. But not even these two artists have ever done anything as outrageous as Sasaki who has created a large glass enclosed, sterile room with a toilet, rows and rows of medicine bottles, and a terminally ill young woman (Alex Lodge) lying in a bed. 

Just when you think that the play is going to be a discussion about What is Art? it, like Yasmina Reza’s Art, morphs into a play about relationships. The playwright in the programme states her play is not abut the superficial art world and power and status but about “thosed missed connections, moments of cowardice, and our human need to be seen and heard by those we love.”

It is impossible to mention the relationships between the woman in the glass room and the people who come to talk to her without spoiling the tension that the playwright creates, despite too many details about events that happened in the past, but I wonder why it is necessary to create so extreme a situation in order to illuminate those very familiar “missed connections”.  
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