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The River, written by the British playwright Jez Butterworth (Jerusalem, Ford v Ferrari), is a 2012 play that ushers us into the world of The Man (Ewen Leslie). He is so absorbed in his trout-fishing hobby that he won’t stop to watch a sunset with The Woman (Miranda Otto, returning to the Sydney Theatre Company stage after 15 years), even though he has romantically brought her to his remote cabin for the first time. The new couple are figuring each other out: flirting, testing, learning how to navigate disagreements and each other’s quirks before our eyes. It’s tense, intimate and insistently – sometimes obnoxiously – mysterious.
Because the woman goes missing. And then we’re back in the cabin with the man and – it turns out – The Other Woman (Andrea Demetriades), who is visiting the cabin for the first time, cajoled into trout fishing, trading secrets and flirting …
Anna Tregloan’s spare set – the cabin is only a wooden frame – and Damien Cooper’s shifting, mood-affected lighting, are doing a lot of heavy lifting for a play frequently described as a mix between a mystery and a puzzle. On the Drama Theatre stage the result is only gently eerie but that’s enough to invite us into a twilight space where you can’t quite trust what you see.
Without that, and without Margaret Thanos’s directorial hand tightening the play’s focus to the rituals and discoveries made in a tentative romance, the play would feel stuck in the shallows: gestural, deliberately unresolved and hollow.
Leslie’s man is romantic, but mostly about the trout; he makes the woman read Ted Hughes’ After Moonless Midnight aloud to convince her of the beauty of fly fishing in the pitch dark. She’s not convinced, and the man is put out by her refusal to be enthusiastic about Hughes. He tells a long story about the electrifying first moment he ever hooked a sea trout, only for it to get away, which is clearly linked to the troubling sense building in every scene in the play: the women in his life are slipping off the hook too.
The man is also deliberately withholding; by the play’s design, we’re not supposed to know his true intentions. What we do know is that he tells at least two women he’s never said or done these exact same things with another woman before, exhibiting at best a lack of imagination when it comes to dating or – not at worst, but worse – that he views the women as interchangeable. The “at worst” is the hinted danger: after all, didn’t the woman go missing before suddenly we switched scenes and the other woman was in the cabin? What happened there?
It’s not unpleasant to watch. Leslie is appealingly and almost impossibly likable, Demetriades is refreshingly playful and Otto is warm and open. But the threat of possible violence or harm against these women feels like a cheap trick to give a slight drama more heft.
It also doesn’t help that much of the play’s dialogue – in its tight, 80-minute runtime – often features the man and both women describing, to each other, events that happened between them earlier in the day. This exposition is clunky and mannered, which makes the play’s hyper-intimate look at evolving relationships fall short; this can’t be how these people would really talk to each other.
There is a hint of something interesting in how The River explores all the ways we contort ourselves to be appealing to others – these women pretending they want to spend the night fishing in the dark, and this man pretending he doesn’t care at all, actually, that a woman moved his table when it’s clearly driving him nuts. But you have to dig past the play’s affected insistence on being mysterious to get there.
Since The River’s debut, reviews and articles following in its wake have murmured about a twist in the final scene that can’t be spoiled, or a deeper meaning in the work that audiences must discern for themselves. These whispers give The River a little too much credit. It’s a slippery drama that, like the trout fishing the man loves so much, makes no promises. It might reel you in. It might not.
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The River is at Sydney Opera House until 16 May
