This Is How It Goes by Neil LaBute - Darlinghurst Theatre, 27 Feb – 22 Mar 08

I love it when you’re in the theatre, the actors have taken their bows, everyone has finished clapping and the lights are back up and ... no one is moving. At This Is How It Goes by Neil LaBute, directed by Toby Schmitz, everyone was either stunned or eager to move onto idle conversation to break the intensity of its last moments.

This story tricks you onto the side of the racist. It’s brilliant! I could feel everyone’s faces collectively drop in the last diatribe by our protagonist who at this point leads us down an overtly racist commentary including confronting words of ‘coon’ and the like. I know I should have read some of LaBute's work by now, so after writing this entry, I’m off to Berkelouw's to buy everything I can lay my hands on.

At the beginning of the journey we are presented with the protagonist (who is played by Patrick Brammall but whose character name isn’t established). He talks directly to us. He is humble yet opinionated, and his language is familiar. He chats with us casually in typical daily parlance of disjointed sentences and colloquialisms. He is our narrator. He is the presenter of scenes in which he is involved and in others not. In between the scenes (and sometimes in the middle of them) he stops to chat to the audience to deliver his own take on things, while the rest the characters freeze in time. He even passes his cap to a patron in the front row, at one point, to mind while he steps into a new scene.

We like him; he is charismatic, charming and the underdog enough to make us feel he is one of us. And at the end of the play we are left to question just how much like him we are?

This play is simple with only three characters: Belinda, played by Rebecca Rocheford Davies, Cory, played by Wayne McDaniel with his Samuel L. Jackson-like voice and speech patterns, and our narrator.

The direction (as well as the lighting and set) is simple and focuses on impeccable and comic timing as well as the Schmitz cool attitude. I can almost feel the Schmitz fervent persona come through in Patrick Brammall’s more casual performance.

Unfortunately, you’ve missed the Darlinghurst Theatre production now, but go out and buy the play and enjoy the slap in the face at the end.