THEATRE: BUMMING WITH JANE

PREVIEW BY LACHLAN JOBBINS

Although it takes its title from one of his poems, playwright Tahli Corin is careful to emphasize that Bumming with Jane is inspired by’rather than based on’the writing of American poet Charles Bukowski.

“I was inspired by the work and by the characters, but I certainly don’t try to write like him – or be an Australian version.”

Now on at Belvoir St’s Downstairs Theatre, the B Sharp production is about a pair of no-hopers who spend their time drinking cheap wine and watching TV, finding food in dumpsters and constructing elaborate fantasies’anything to avoid going out and finding work.

Corin discovered the poem in the book You Get So Alone at Times It Just Makes Sense, and was immediately drawn into his world where ‘there wasn’t a stove/ and we put cans of beans/ in hot water in the sink/ to heat them’ and ‘we drank and sang/ and/ fought.’

“I connected with this wild woman who told her partner to drink port out of a shoe,” she says. “I started looking for other poems about Jane. I wanted to know more about her, about their relationship and how it was so wonderful and so awful at the same time.”

Starting with the feisty and very sexual Jane (played here by Sophie Cook), she re-imagined the situation into a local context, with two young people living on the edge of poverty in modern day Sydney.

The play is about choices. It follows Patrick (Tahki Saul) and Jane from mad irresponsibility to the brink of disaster. “The play sits on the precipice. They might be okay, or they might fall.” Into the mix is their landlord, played with just the right amount of sexual aggression by Gertraud Ingeborg.

The climax of the story is when Patrick and Sophie get so far behind with their rent that their landlord evicts them. “There are times when we don’t want to take responsibility for the choices we make. But circumstances can dictate choice. We always think we have it, but there are times when it’s out of our hands.”

Tahki Saul and Cook are a bit clean-looking to be denizens of Bukowski’s wino milieu, but Ingeborg is a standout as the landlord. Overall, it’s a well-constructed play full of dark humour and poignant moments, and’in the traditional of Bukowki himself’the ending twists the knife beautifully. Well worth seeing.

Bumming with Jane
Until September 7
Belvoir St Theatre
25 Belvoir St, Surry Hills
Tickets: $23-$29 (Tuesdays pay what you can, min $10), 9699 3444 or www.belvoir.com.au