Catch as Catch Can - Old Fitz

Catch as Catch Can – Old Fitz

Under Anna Houston's direction, Empress Theatre's Catch as Catch Can by Mia Chung is an achievement of considerable intelligence, precision and theatrical daring. Houston understands that the actors are the heart of this event, and that everything else must serve them. There is no fuss, no unnecessary embellishment, no director's signature stamped over the top. Instead, she creates the conditions for three extraordinary performers to do what they do best: inhabit a world, transform it and make us believe in it.

Mia Chung's conceit is more than a clever trick. Set among two working-class Catholic families in New England - the Italian-American Lavecchias and the Irish-American Phelans - Catch as Catch Can begins with the familiar pleasures of domestic comedy. There is gossip, ritual, shared history and the casual cruelty of people who have known one another for decades. When Tim Phelan returns home after time away in California, the equilibrium of these interconnected families begins to unravel. Prejudice, emotional neglect and psychological distress emerge from beneath the everyday.

The virtuosic centrepiece of Mia Chung's play is, quite simply, to die for.

The three actors play the six onstage characters, moving between parents and their adult children, across gender and generation, sometimes in the one breath. There are no conventional costume changes to announce the transformations. The actors shift their physicality, voice, rhythm and emotional register, and suddenly the person standing before us is someone else entirely. As they prepare for a Christmas get-together, their chatter conjures an entire community of people who never appear onstage.

It is a masterclass in acting, and in the possibilities of theatre itself. Writers, directors, performers and makers of every discipline will learn something from the audacity and discipline on display here.

This cast is a cracking, charismatic ensemble, and part of the pleasure is watching each performer individually.

Robin McLeavy inhabits her characters with such raw, granular detail that it becomes impossible to look away. There is something almost ancient in her understanding of human nature, as though she can reach into the deepest, most mysterious corners of a character and bring them startlingly to life.

Andre de Vanny has an alluring, deeply rooted presence. His performances are tightly coiled, every movement and inflection held in exquisite control, until something gives way and the character spills beyond its own boundaries. His precision is almost frightening; he makes the smallest shift feel seismic.

David Soncin is hilarious as the mother, finding comedy in the character’s every gesture and inflection, then shifts into something altogether weightier as the son. The transformation is seamless. He gives each character a distinct physical life and emotional logic, moving between comic precision and profound gravity without losing the specificity of either.

Together, they are consummate. Separately, each is a privilege to watch

You can read about how the doubling makes the play's preoccupation with inheritance physically visible. We don't simply hear about the ways children resemble their parents; we watch the same body contain both generations. The habits, prejudices and emotional evasions of one generation seem to transmute into the next. Family resemblance becomes something more troubling than genetics: a reminder of how much of ourselves we receive before we are old enough to question it.

First produced in New York in 2018, with a revised production at Playwrights Horizons in 2022, Catch as Catch Can has attracted considerable attention for its unusual theatrical architecture. The Australian premiere at the Old Fitz gives Sydney audiences the opportunity to encounter a work whose form is inseparable from its subject.

Chung's ambitions extend beyond the ingenious mechanics of the piece, and this is where the play becomes more complicated.

As the action moves into darker emotional territory, the production conjures the almost psychedelic sensation of watching someone lose their grip on reality. The familiar rules of the world begin to falter. What is real? Which lives are we living? How much of what we understand as identity is our own, and how much has been shaped by family, history and circumstance?

Slow scene changes and surprising musical choices deepen the sense of disorientation. Houston and her cast navigate these tonal shifts with impressive clarity, even as the psychological landscape becomes increasingly unstable. The actors give us just enough to hold on to, even as the ground beneath them and us begins to move.

But does the play entirely work?

What Chung is attempting is substantial and ambitious. Yet there are moments when the formal ingenuity seems to outpace the emotional logic of the drama. The relationship between the play's theatrical conceit and its psychological trajectory doesn't always cohere. The ideas are compelling, their cumulative emotional force is less certain. Do the intellectual and emotional threads resolve into a whole that is as satisfying as its individual parts?

For me, not entirely. Formal invention must do more than impress us with its ingenuity. It must deepen our understanding, sharpen our feeling or take us somewhere we could not otherwise go. At times, Catch as Catch Can leaves me admiring the architecture more than feeling the full weight of what it contains.

That reservation matters. The production's technical accomplishment and the cast's virtuosity can’t, on their own, resolve the question of whether the play's form fully serves its emotional ambitions. Indeed, the performances are so compelling that they make the question more apparent: what might this ensemble achieve if the dramatic structure carried the same force as its theatrical invention?

Houston's production succeeds in making these questions compelling. Even where Chung's ideas remain elusive, the work has an appetite for risk that is refreshing. It is not content to tell a familiar story in a familiar way, and its willingness to push beyond the comfortable boundaries of domestic realism is part of its power.

The production is an achievement. That much is clear.

Walking away from it, I find myself thinking about something beyond the play.

The Old Fitz is exactly the right room for this production. Its intimacy allows us to see the minute adjustments of a performance, to witness the craft at work, to feel the difference between a gesture that is merely illustrative and one that opens an entire world. What does it take to support the artists who make such work possible?

I write as an artist who has worked across scales, as so many of us do in Australia. Our arts sector is dynamic and interconnected. We move between projects, organisations and ways of working, becoming resourceful and adaptable to keep practising our craft. This flexibility is a strength, but it can also mask the precariousness of the conditions in which artists work.

I can't presume to know what this production has cost the artists who made it, financially or otherwise. My concern is with the broader conditions in which artistic work gets made and what happens when those conditions become impossible to sustain.

There is an unspoken compact in the arts: some work will always be made at the margins, and artists will find other ways to pay the bills. Writers, composers and artists have long held other jobs while making work that outlasts them. There is nothing wrong with having another profession or choosing to work outside the commercial mainstream.

But choosing how to support a creative practice is not the same as being forced to subsidise it indefinitely through insecure employment and personal financial sacrifice. The fact that work is made despite these conditions is no reason to leave them unchanged.

The artists who bring Catch as Catch Can to the stage each night have accumulated the judgement, skill and experience that make work of this calibre possible. What we see is the result of years of practice, persistence and risk. That investment has value for the artists themselves, for audiences and for the culture we share.

Artists have lives to lead and rent to pay. We celebrate resilience in the arts, but resilience is not a funding model.

The question is not whether artists can find ways to survive. It is whether survival is all we are prepared to offer them. Arts funding needs to do more than support individual productions. It must help artists build lasting careers, take risks and make work that shifts how we see the world.

When artists leave the profession because they can no longer afford to stay, we lose more than individual careers. We lose knowledge, skill and the work they might otherwise have made. I don't want artists of this calibre to disappear, or talented newcomers to burn themselves out proving they belong in a profession that cannot reliably sustain them. Nor should we mistake the resourcefulness of artists for evidence that the system is working.

Catch as Catch Can is an achievement, both for the artists who have made it and for the audiences fortunate enough to experience it. My questions about the play remain, and so does my admiration for the ambition and craft on display.

We know how to celebrate artistic excellence. The question is whether we are prepared to invest in the artists who make it possible - not just for one production, but for the long haul.

Review by Kate Gaul

Image: Phil Erbacher