Review: Wrest is too much show

The Spinoff

4 days ago

Sam Brooks reviews the new show from Red Leap, a visually stunning mix of theatre and dance.
A mundane breakfast, repeated ad nauseam. A coat check in a club. A bloody operating table. A woman pulled in two in a moment at a bus stop. These are images that show up in Red Leap's new show, Wrest, a hybrid of theatre and dance exploring early motherhood. These are also the images that have lingered with me long after the show.
They aren't necessarily the images that you might associate with the setting of Wrest, which is set in a neo-noir world that feels closer to Cyberpunk 2077 or Deus Ex than the modern day. They also aren't the images you would associate with the actual narrative of Wrest, which follows a woman – or really, two women, played by Shavorn Mortimer and Ariāna Osborne – literally and sometimes metaphorically finding themselves.
Wrest is two shows in one, and too often, these two shows seem in conflict with each other rather than in conversation. The show about motherhood is moving, with a vibrant physicality. The neo-noir mystery allows the show to play inside a rich, familiar, canvas. Too often, however, the mystery is put on pause to develop a visual language, which makes the sequences where the mystery takes centre stage feel perfunctory and even explanatory, rather than evocative. Neither is bad, although I prefer the show about motherhood to the mystery, but they seldom feel connected to each other.
The best thing about a Red Leap show is that they demand a lot of the artists they work with, and the artists – on and offstage – absolutely rise to the occasion. While the neo-noir setting lends itself to impressive imagery and an undeniable style, it distracts from the themes of motherhood and identity that Wrest is clearly more interested in exploring. It's not necessarily a question of genre – noir is a broad church of interrogations into various human conditions – but of balance.
As the leads, Mortimer and Osborne nail two sides of the same coin. They match each other's physicality and vocal musicality – even though the show has scant dialogue – without being exact mirrors of each other. Mortimer wrangles with the show's centrepiece adeptly, and it's a moment that risks becoming the show's thematic statement just in case the audience have missed it, but she grounds it in an aching humanity that makes the preceding 75 minutes feel worth it, even cohesive. The ensemble is, as is usual for Red Leap, excellent, with Shadon Meredith's specific character work being especially impressive; he moves like a dancer, not like an actor working with choreography.
Red Leap is also a company that never fails to deliver, visually and aurally. It goes, then, that the production design, courtesy of Rachel Marlow at Filament 11, is world-class. Sets that would be centrepieces in other productions seem to pop out of nowhere, and disappear just as quickly. A full nightclub is simply (to the audience) spun into focus and then spun out of focus. It is seamless, and impressive.
It's in the design that the two shows sitting inside Wrest feel like they actually could belong together. The coldness, even the meaninglessness of the neo-noir world that the two women inhabit, is a rich palette for the lack of direction the characters feel. Where the show really reaches out and grabs you is in the body horror moments – amped up by Eden Mulholland's haunting score – a reminder that some of the most seemingly natural and normal things that a human might go through can be the most absolutely horrific when viewed from afar, or examined from a different direction.
The images are so beautiful, so specific, and so rich, but they are so unsupported by the narrative that they end up feeling less like pieces of live performance and movement and more like paintings in a gallery. The designers are working at the height of their ability here, but the story is too generic, and too confusing, that it ends up forming its own kind of fourth wall, placing the audience at a remove when we should be invested. It also doesn't help that the show is very light on dialogue in a genre that is famous for its intricate, musical patter. Noir is the rare genre that can get away with the audience walking away not understanding everything that happened, and dance is an artform that lingers in the same lack of comprehension, but it doesn't feel intentional here.
As complaints go, 'too much show' is not the worst one. There is so much at play in Wrest that the genuinely moving, and distressing, exploration of motherhood is hidden. There's so much good in this show, but it's not necessarily the kind of good that fits on the same stage. I'd love to see Red Leap tackle a neo-noir, and play with this cinematic language more onstage. I'd also love to see them continue to explore this thematic territory, I could see a thousand shows about motherhood and still want to see more. In this case, however, I found myself wanting to – apologies – wrest Wrest from itself.