Proof. By David Auburn. Originally directed by Derek Walker. Tour director Tyran Parke. FREEFALL Productions. Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, Queanbeyan. Until March 17. Bookings theq.net.au or (02) 6285 6290.
Proof is a delicate and fluid piece about men and women and maths and fathers. And daughters. And honesty.
Robert (Gerard Carroll) is a mathematician with two daughters. Claire (Julia Christensen) is the one who has escaped the ramshackle house in Chicago to forge a life in New York. Catherine (Ylaria Rogers) has been increasingly pulled away from her studies to care for a father who is becoming more and more erratic. Hal (Alexander Brown) is one of Robert's students, keen for advancement.
Robert's death propels the action. Claire comes from New York meaning to sell the house out from under a very vulnerable Catherine. Hal moves in on the place hoping to find mathematical gold among his teacher's notebooks. But what if it is Catherine who has created the elusive "proof"?
The show is absorbingly well done and tightly directed.
Christensen gives the elegant Claire a relentlessly bullying manner. The character's not particularly likeable. But she has inherited no mathematical genius, only a flair for currency trading. She's focused on selling the house and moving Catherine up to New York for what she sees as necessary treatment.
In her view Catherine has no particular gifts and may be heading the same way as Robert. The tensions of sibling rivalry come through powerfully.
Carroll is poignant as Robert, struggling with the loss of his powers, trying to pass knowledge on to students yet not altogether valuing the daughter who is taking it all in as she tries to care for him. Time is flexible in this play so sometimes he's a memory, sometimes real.
Brown's engagingly gangling Hal may redeem himself finally but is as manipulative as Claire. He's in his late 20s and he and his male geek mathematical mates don't have much time to make a mark.
Rogers leads the cast in an excellent performance as Catherine, struggling with the wish to look after her father but also with the desire to work with mathematics. She's discounted but perseveres. There is a suggestion that she may be becoming as erratic as her father. Or is that the fatigue of five years looking after him as he degenerates?
The past and present intertwine well in this taut production. The set is a little boxy and lacking in character and the transitional passages are prone to flashing lights. But this touring show proceeds at a great pace and becomes an absorbing night at the theatre.
Ten years on from its beginnings, the Queanbeyan Performing Art Centre has certainly become the place to see quality touring performances.