Down will come baby: ARC’s “Rockabye” is more than just a fierce, funny takedown of celebrity

ARC is an ensemble-based company that does one production each year, which I look forward to with relish. I know it will be the Canadian premiere of an international work that I’m not familiar with. I know that work will grapple with big ideas that engage and challenge me. And I know the actors and production team will deliver an energetic experience that burns itself into my memory.   

This year’s production – of Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith’s 2009 play Rockabye  – does not disappoint on any of these fronts. Directed smartly by Rob Kempson, Rockabye is a funny, fast-moving, fast-talking comedy that burrows deeply into the intersection of fame, personal identity, and politics.

A scenery-chewing Deborah Drakeford is the protagonist Sidney, an aging and self-absorbed pop star who is past her prime. A more abrasive and insecure version of Jean Smart’s Emmy-winning Deborah Vance from Hacks, she launches cringeworthy hot takes to mask the insecurities of her entitled celebrity.  

Sidney feels intense pressure to reinvent herself for a society that no longer idolizes her . . . and it seems she just may have done it with her new album. But at the same time, she is feeling a more personal pressure . . .  to become a mother. And her goal is to do it Madonna- or Angelina Jolie-style – by adopting an orphaned African child. 

Christopher Allen is magnetic as Tobias Beresford, the confident and mercurial TV host and journalist who will make or break Sidney’s ambitions. In a cutting critique of the cult of celebrity, Beresford and Sidney are locked into the predatory symbiosis of interviewer and star, which tangles up their different financial agendas and artistic aspirations. 

Shauna Thompson’s Layla is Tobias’ match in cool confidence and capability. Sparks fly between the two, and we learn that they have a shared past, and a present in which she has a difficult job to do and a fine line to walk.

Sergio di Zio is delightful as Sydney’s frazzled long-serving agent, oscillating between over-the-top booster, truth-telling ‘‘tough love’’ provider, and world-weary veteran of the entertainment wars. Because we’ve seen versions of this persona in other productions and media, he gets free reign to deliver some of the show’s funniest and most illuminating lines.  

Rounding out the cast are Nabil Traboulsi as Alfie, Sidney’s delightfully clueless boy toy; Kyra Harper as Esme, her clear-eyed, older housekeeper; and a brisk Julie Lumsden as Sidney’s unflappable Personal Assistant Julia. 

In the entertainment industry, there’s no end of opinions to expound, insecurities to tease out, and angles or individuals to manipulate. So like last year’s ARC production Martyr, Rockabye is a talky play. The dialogue flies so fast that there’s little opportunity to savour the funniest lines. 

What makes the talk in Rockabye especially dense and intense is the shifting ground that it occupies. Each character has a defined role in the ecosystem around Sidney, plus a personal backstory that they will eventually reveal. That backstory – through which we gain details of race, class, orientation, ideology, etc. – helps us to situate and begin to understand them as individuals, when they begin articulating their strong points of view on the major issue(s) at play – which go well past the foibles of celebrity. Fast, deep talk is needed to get both the personalities and the positions onto the table, so the real complexity of the matters at hand can be opened up.  

The play opens in a firestorm of staccato sentences fired back and forth between Drakeford’s over-the-top Sidney and Lumsden’s cool and capable Julia. The hilarious sequence – focused on an article of clothing that Sidney desperately wants – connects Sidney’s empty ambition to its implausible real-world  implications.  

In miniature form, their exchange foreshadows the overt and impassioned political debates to come. For by play’s end, point and counterpoint are being channeled through longer exposition and intense, high-stakes position-taking. In between, we track Sidney’s and Tobias’ and Laila’s journeys through a world dominated by the superficial allure of celebrity, but animated by deeper forces and truths. 

Jackie Chau’s minimalist set and Jareth Li’s lighting design keep our eyes – and ears – trained  tightly on the conversations driving these character dynamics. The set is little more than blocky couches and chairs which are repositioned in moments of darkness to signal setting changes. And looming over the proceedings is a fluorescent Andy Warhol-style painting with multi-coloured images of Sidney: a garish, glossy surface atop her embattled on-stage quest for meaning beyond fame. 

The characters’ ever-escalating talk becomes uncomfortable – but this is a feature of the play, not a bug. Rockabye argues that all politics is not just local: it’s personal. 

And because of this lack of distance between the person and the politics, we don’t get the luxury of parking our sympathies with any one of these characters. 

Instead, as the winds of conversation blow harder and harder, we listen. We consider. We shift our view. 

Maybe we fret a little, and do it again. 

Until the bough of loquacious complication breaks, and the play ends at the precise and perfect moment that it must. 

Down will come baby, cradle and all.

Rockabye is on stage at Factory Theatre Mainstage until February 11, 2024. Visit factorytheatre.ca to reserve tickets.

© Scott Sneddon, Sesayarts Magazine, 2024