Review: Poor Boy

Poor Boy By Matt Cameron and Tim Finn. Melbourne Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company. Sumner Theatre, MTC Theatre, Melbourne. January 28. Until March 8. Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay, July 9 to August 1. Tickets: $79.20. Bookings: 1300 723 038.

POOR Boy opens with some seductive theatrical conceits. As the audience enters the auditorium, we encounter a poetically imagined Australian backyard: tufted grass, cumulus sky, a string of washing, a not-quite-solid house structured rather like the bridge of a ship. It's a set that, more than anything else, summons nostalgia. As with Arthur Miller's imagined stages, we know before a word is spoken that boundaries between the present and the past are troubled and unstable.

Danny (Guy Pearce) pushes the washing line aside, as if it is a curtain, and launches into the play's title song. He becomes an animating spirit, sweeping dust sheets aside that reveal different cast members and summoning the musicians, who rise out of the floor with the music. By the song's end, the play has been magicked into existence. This sequence shows director Simon Phillips at his best: he has a gift for graceful mise en scene, tempered here to Matt Cameron's gently absurdist imagination. It's hard to think of a better way to premiere the MTC's new Sumner Theatre. It's a gorgeous thing: the stage has everything that opens and closes, and the steeply raked, European-style auditorium makes watching a play a wholly pleasurable experience.

Poor Boy itself, which features songs taken from various Tim Finn albums since the early 1980s, is a peculiar beast, and despite the odd moment of lyrical splendour or passionate performance (especially from the always reliable Greg Stone), it doesn't escape some fundamental conceptual problems. Using extant popular songs to punctuate a show is as old as The Beggar's Opera. But Poor Boy demonstrates that a pop song, however finely crafted, is not necessarily theatrical. As the familiar songs rolled out, the sometimes desperately illustrative staging began to remind me irresistibly of a music video, in the same way that the play itself -- a kind of supernatural melodrama -- was reminiscent of a TV soap.

The play could have done, certainly, with some of a soap opera's economy and dramatic drive. Poor Boy is a slight story that can't sustain its 2 1/2 hours, and it doesn't avoid moments of cheese or sheer silliness. But for breathtaking visual sumptuousness, it's hard to trump.