Theatre Review: Lullaby Jock

Written and performed by Simon Ferry
Directed by Tim Spite
Downstage Theatre
Info & bookings: Downstage Theatre - Lullaby Jock
Press release: One man’s war story, a portrait of a generation

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn." Lullaby Jock at Downstage is a rollicking good yarn with plenty of laughs but perhaps Simon Ferry should have let a little compassion get in the way of his good yarn.

Gaylene Preston’s Home by Christmas and this play have much in common. Simon Ferry’s dad Jock saw more action and was more damaged by the war than Ed Preston but Preston’s portrayal of her dad was more sensitive than Ferry’s and better for its compassion. In common the two stories have; women left behind, chaps going off on an exciting adventure and getting more than they bargained for, men returning changed utterly, hardened, and unable or unwilling to tell their story until it is nearly too late. Jock’s yarn, the programme notes, is an amalgam of the stories from many returned soldiers but Jock Ferry brave soldier, life and soul of the party, singer (which is more than you can say of his son), father of nine, teacher and friend deserves better.

Lullaby Jock is more cliché than lullaby. A cliché because it is also universal experience, war is a buggar, it continues to shatter lives way after the cease-fire. When will we ever learn.

The lullaby begins at Jock’s funeral. Simon, Jock’s youngest , is delivering the eulogy when Jock pops out of the plain pine coffin and tells some parts of the rest of the story himself. And the coffin itself upstages him, it is the star.

Simon Ferry the actor plays all parts with energy and racy vigour. But the coffin too, plays its many roles with great skill and panache. It is a piano on a Goon show style journey to another house, it is a motor bike coming home after a night out doing opera for the Italians, it is a push bike, it is movingly cradled for the lament/lullaby for dead son Peter, it is a big field gun, and all kinds of doors and walls and posts and screens. Even the projected faces of remembered people are carried by the coffin.

Simon Ferry gets his gear off and on with amazing dexterity, there is hardly a moment to draw breath as he staggers between the decades, back and forth, with no real reason for the shifts in time. But the thread holds, the small town RSA joker’s funeral is the stitching. The play is what it is, and it is clever well-done theatre, but that is all and it isn’t really enough.

ENDS

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