Nucleus
Writer: Alana Valentine
Director: Andrea James
Seymour Centre
February 19 – March 15, 2025
Award-winning playwright Alana Valentine, sharp as a tack, courageous and compassionate, once again takes up the challenge of placing the patriarchal and colonial Australian psyche under her microscope. With typical Valentine insight, Nucleus fuses the feudal tragedy of love-struck enemies with the destructive contemporary pursuit of divisiveness as a means of gaining power.
Valentine situates her exploration of the danger and ultimate futility of divisiveness in the currently revived debate over nuclear power, a fitting subject. Apart from the figurative connection to the process of producing nuclear power – nuclear fission – the debate – or rather conflict – provides a range of pros and cons, some of which are equally valid.
Valentine skilfully mines the material she had meticulously researched for several years to create her two knowledgeable characters who support opposing views with admirable although sometimes blind passion. The two seasoned actors, Paula Arundell as Dr Cassie Logart, a paediatrician, as the anti-nuclear campaigner and Peter Kowitz as Dr Gabriel Hulst, a nuclear engineer, bring Valentine’s astute and lyrical script to thrilling and convincing life.
Arundell is enchanting as the mercurial Cassie. She is not afraid to make use of her youthful sex appeal to entrap the older Gabriel with a view to blackmail and her reflections over sleeping with the enemy are hilariously brash. Undoubtedly, she holds the trump card but she doesn’t play it as over breakfast Gabriel’s spontaneous ode to a shampoo bottle surprisingly reveals a man she might love. Touched by his sincerity she asks the play’s pivotal question: is it possible to love someone with whom you disagree utterly? Should feeling or ideology guide our choices?
While Gabriel is a less immediately appealing character, Kowitz convincingly portrays his enraged denials of Cassie’s arguments as a deeply personal rather than intellectual response. In his opening monologue Gabriel says it is difficult for him to express how much he dislikes Cassie Logart’s “opinion”; he nevertheless manages to disparage her person with infantile petulance. The predictable chemical outcome of his “engineered” meeting with Cassie in the Orchid Bar leaves Gabriel humiliated, and when they re-encounter each other he is accusatory and hurtful. Self-righteously, he proclaims that shared values are the basis for a shared life. Impasse.
Structurally, the play is very engaging as we move revelation by revelation not to an answer but to the possibility of looking elsewhere than at who is winning or losing. Cassie won the short game but as the British Gabriel, so colonial in manner and costume (design, Isabel Hudson), reminds her, there is still the long game as he has now been asked to do a new risk assessment of Cassie’s home country. It would be a tragic end if not for “the quiet and gentle wind named hope” implicit in Gabriel’s request to be taught how to look at things in a different way and the reassurance in the promise of a joint title and in a joint inheritance.
We are reminded, as we look up at a spectacular giant DNA molecule, of a much longer game. Occasionally it flickers or changes colour responding perhaps to the world the actors are creating for themselves and for the future from the choices they make.
A very beautifully crafted play, Nucleus is sensitively directed by Andrea James who handles its many layers and nuances with skill and power. The creative crew, who are so important to a satisfying theatrical experience, excelled themselves. The set is stunning, the costumes perfectly attuned to character and circumstance, and the subtle use of cello evocative. Especially effective is the mournful call of the yellow-tailed black cockatoo summoning Cassie to a different journey.
