bAKEHOUSE's 'Human Activity' at KXT Broadway: Review

There’s a heavy weight here. Human Activity bears it exceptionally well.

The play begins with birdsong. We are in Sydney’s Angel Place, seated below a small-scale reconstruction of Michael Thomas Hill’s Forgotten Songs birdcage installation, listening to these recorded songs; calls of native birds which once populated areas that currently house busy Sydney streets but are now extinct or only found at the city’s outskirts due to long-standing of colonisation and industrialisation. It’s both a sobering and apt start to a piece which traces the large impacts on loss on small, everyday people.

Though set the day after the 2014 Lindt Café siege, Katie Pollock’s Human Activity is not about the siege directly. Rather, it forms a sort of locus on which the play hinges; reverberations which bring together the seemingly disparate lives of the play’s somewhat extensive list of key characters, and the tragedies of everyday life. This destabilisation of the city allows for the lives of our characters to collide.

We witness the development of a fraught relationship between Arti (Trishala Sharma), a young woman her way to a Macquarie Street clinic for an important, yet initially undisclosed, medical appointment, and Jana (Katherine Shearer), a homeless woman who has been relocated to Angel Place as a result of the previous day’s events. We also meet a grieving elderly couple (Claudette Clarke and Phillip Lye) on an annual trip retracing the last steps of their late adopted daughter; a security guard (Athrav Kolhatkhar) who increasingly asserts his newfound elevated authority; two women (Madhullika Singh and Teresa Tate Britten) utilising the crowds to sell marked up cold drinks and tribute flowers respectively; and a gang of entitled private school teens (Josephine Gazard, Karina Bracken, Mason Phoumirath, Singh, Tate Britten) who loiter around and cause trouble later on.

Aided by the urban simplicity of the set, costuming, and soundscape (designed by Soham Apte; lit by Benjamin Brockman; and sound by Jessica Pizzinga), director Suzanne Millar weaves together these multiple narratives with ease, creating a production ambitious in scope and character oriented in nature. Sharma and Shearer, in particular, shine as Arti and Jana; their desperation and unlikely connection forming the heart of connection that Pollock espouses through her script. Kolhatkhar too is dynamic, bringing forth laughs and bated-breath silences in equal capacity.

Despite this, there are occasional lapses in cohesion toward the end of the play. The sudden change in direction feels a little out of place when compared to previous action, loose ends concerning suitcases are left untied, and Pollock’s script at times is a little too on-the-nose when pushing particular points. While this does not detract heavily from the enjoyment of the production, I was left with feeling some confusion upon its conclusion.

However, both the cast and production team have to be commended on the rooted reality of the story told and ways it has been told; on the juxtaposition made between the largeness of violence made against a collective, and the invasive persistence of everyday violences in the form of homelessness, institutional harm, sexual harm and assault, coercive control, and domestic abuse; on the call to show compassion and care to those who find themselves alone. There’s a heavy weight here. Human Activity bears it exceptionally well.

Human Activity plays at KXT on Broadway until September 30, after which the production will transfer to Parramatta’s Riverside Theatres. Tickets can be found here.