The Brag

Eamon Farren as Moses in Babyteeth

Babyteeth
A Matter of Life and Death
By Simon Binns

Eamon Flack has been pretty busy in recent months; aside from being the Associate Director for New Projects at a theatre company that’s currently got three plays up, he’s also gone straight from directing the much lauded, delightfully ridiculous As You Like It into rehearsals for Rita Kalnejais’ (whom you might know better as an actor with recent roles in The Kiss and STC’s The Trial) new play Babyteeth. In fact as Flack explains, the processes bled right into each other.

“The set designer Bob Cousins and I were having design meetings [for Babyteeth] during tech week of As You Like It because we were already late,” says Flack. As soon as the Shakespeare was up and running, he launched headlong into the fresh script, which he had been working on with Kalnejais for over a year.

As Flack sheepishly admits, their excitement for the play reached almost fever pitch in the lead up to their first rehearsals, “to the extent that on New Year’s Eve I drove up to Killcare where Rita was staying; I arrived at quarter-to-one in the morning and she read me the scene she’d just finished rewriting for the draft so we could send it out New Year’s Day. We got a bit carried away.”

Flack’s last two main-stage offerings couldn’t be further apart in terms of form and content: As You Like It was an excessive ensemble-cast rom-com, all confetti and sheep costumes, whereas his staging of Samuel Beckett’s The End was a one-hander exploring existential angst and death. Babyteeth seems to sit pretty much right in the centre; Flack says it’s unlike any he’s ever read or seen.

“It’s basically a comedy about a fourteen-year-old girl dying of cancer – [which] doesn’t quite capture the depth and breadth of the experience of life that is going on in the play,” he hastens to tell me. Centred around the terminally ill Milla, the play is populated by extraordinary and perplexing people: Moses, a drug addicted dog groomer who is also the object of Milla’s affections; Gidon, her eccentric Latvian violin teacher; and her parents, who have their own mixed bag of addictions and insecurities.

“If within the crammed existence of daily life – in addition to the task of chewing a sandwich and doing a load of washing and maintaining a marriage – suddenly the task of living or dying is added, how do you do that? Where do you squeeze in an understanding of what it means to live and what it means to die?”

This question leaves the characters around Milla in a confusing maelstrom of everyday experiences, their basic needs such as eating and drinking thrown into sharp relief by the reality of a person who might not be able to eat or drink for much longer.

If it seems like it’s hard to pin this play down, that’s precisely what drew Flack to it.

“I think the sign of a great play is that it’s irreducible. If you try to describe what the premise of a Shakespeare is, or the premise of a Chekhov, you can articulate after great effort, great thought and a lot of work, a clear premise – and it’s the same with this: you can say it’s the story of a girl dying of cancer, but that doesn’t actually describe what is really going on.”

What: Babyteeth – Dir. Eamon Flack
When: February 11 – March 18
Where: Belvoir St Theatre
More: Belvoir.com.au