Reminiscent of Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery, playwright Annie Baker, places the audience behind the screen of a dated 35mm-projection movie theatre in small-town America. We're so often too absorbed by Marlene Dietrich, Carey Grant, Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart or Elizabeth Taylor to ever cast our eyes around to acknowledge the faithful cleaners of that theatre we spend so much darkened time in. The Flick makes us pay attention. This unusual reversal of view creates a secret fly-on-the-wall perspective on the lives of three disgruntled, under-paid cinema staff cleaning up popcorn in the theatre between shows. Sam (Ben Prendergast), Rose (Ngaire Dawn Fair), and Avery (Kevin Hofbauer) are no glamorous Hollywood stars, but a troubled, mundane trinity in a transitioning movie theatre: The Flick. 

 

A Red Stictch production, and directed by Nadia Tass, the three actos convincingly play the disillusioned characters, each rooted in their own roles and internal conflicts: Rose the rebellious film projectionist, Sam the ambitious usher and Avery, the film buff. For all its humour, the play plunges the depths of the character's all too real, unglamorous, gritty lives: Sam's love for Rose struggles to find purchase whilst Avery's internal turmoil broils away under the surface. But these players do not stand on stationary ground: their world, the cinema, is changing. The Flick changes hands, investigations into till-skimming are launched, the transition to digital becomes complete, and the comfortable, familiar click of film leaping through the projector is replaced with the alien silence of digital projection. Annie Baker's script brilliantly layers these shifts, and we're left with the feeling of transience. 

 

The Flick is enjoyable yet poignant play and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2014 presenting an unusual setting in a study of the flaws of human lives driven by ego, temptation and hope to cleverly stimulate the audience to reflect on their own morality and ambitions. Yet it's also an elegy to old-school cinemas and film. The Flick forces us to take our eyes off the screen and look around. 

The Flick will show from the 14th of February to the 5th of March at Cremorne Theatre, QPAC. 

 Dr Gemma Regan