bash by Neil Labute
September 26 - October 3, 2003
Victorian Premiere
directed by Julie O’Reilly 
Melbourne Fringe - North Melbourne Town Hall
*Nominated Best Production of Fringe
the stories are revealed with such skill
- The Herald Sun 

Three stories about the dark side of humanity are presented with immense skill. The acting is outstanding, especially from Nikola Dubois in the final piece."
- Stage Left

atrocity is the new black
A white-collar worker confides in a stranger about the downsizing of his family.
A young couple recall the night they attended a fabulous bash in the city.A woman reminisces about a secret affair with her high school English teacher and its tragic consequences.Savage insights into the evil of which we are capable. Murder, hate crime and greed from controversial writer Neil Labute (In The Company of Men, The Shape of Things).
with Dan Walls, Paul Shea, Catherine Kohlen and Nikola Dubois

---

From the moment the house lights dim and the actors take the stage, Bash hooks the audience into a world that is both familiar and surreal. The acclaimed work of American playwright, Neil Labute, Bash is structured into three half-hour pieces that explore the darkness simmering beneath middle-class values.

One of the stories is about a white-collar sales representative who unburdens himself to a stranger from a hotel lobby. Clearly struggling to keep himself together, the nameless sales representative nevertheless tries to keep the atmosphere light with a constant offering to refill drinks or the attempt at a joke.

As the invisible stranger is positioned in the audience, the point is clear that the protagonist is trying to validate himself not to just one person but to everyone, most of all himself. This is a terrifically moving piece about a man dehumanised by the twin forces of corporate America and societal expectation.

It is a taut script that never lets up as it keeps delving further and further into a tortured consciousness where the importance of mortgage payments and family responsibilities become shockingly blurred.

Dan Walls, who is exceptional as the protagonist, makes us care about his character, simply because we recognise him as the everyman struggling to achieve absolution when he knows there is none.

The second piece tells the story of the ‘perfect’ all-American couple that re-live their night on the town before they go off to college. Whereas the first piece evoked a strong sense of reality, this second piece differentiates itself stylistically by emphasising its artifice.

Paul Shea and Catherine Kohlen as the couple look and sound as though they’ve come straight out of a 50s television show, complete with twangy American accents. They’re good-looking, proudly Christian and so cute that they finish each other’s sentences. But we learn that the maintenance of ‘perfection’ can be a brutal task as we find out more about what happened that night. To say much more would give away the twist.

Bash is an immensely disturbing work that is concerned with displacing picture-perfect images of American life with an uneasy and often violent picture of a fractured society. Though the second piece takes too long to make its point and there’s something about a certain revelation that feels contrived, it is nevertheless impossible to be unaffected by its truth and tragedy.
- Melissa Bubnic (expressmedia, Buzzcuts)