Home Theatre

Anthony Lapwood

Te Herenga Waka University Press

Otago Daily Times, July 16th 2022

Once home to the Wellington Repertory Society Theatre, the down-at-heel Repertory Apartments facade retains the twin masks of Tragedy and Comedy, and its dismal flats form the stage for the 13 normal (and not-so-normal) dramas that make up Antony Lapwood’s cleverly constructed and eclectic short story collection.

The tales differ widely in tone, voice and genre. The opening story, ‘The Source of Lighting,’ is pure science-fiction – a time traveller finds himself stuck in a 24-hour loop, stalking an alternative version of himself in the hope he knows the way out – while the next, ‘The Difficult Art of Bargaining’, is written in a realist mode and introduces us to Liv and George, an elderly couple humiliated by the prospect of starting over with nothing after being scammed out of their life savings. In ‘They Always Come For The Sweet Things’ a young boy watches his mother battle with an infestation of ants and reflects on the way life has changed since his parents split up, and in the eerie ‘Provided with Eyes, Thou Departest’ a grieving widower, Bryce, either revivifies his wife, suffers a nervous breakdown, or both. 

Living as they do within a small, defined community, it is unsurprising that characters from different stories appear as extras in each other’s dramas or hover off-stage to be mentioned only in passing: Sam, the boy from ‘Sweet Things’ is entranced by a rainbow scarf dropped by the Liv in ‘Bargaining’, who in turn considers buying a sofa from the time-traveller’s partner Ashton, while the Bryce, the protagonist of ‘Departest’ teaches at the same school as the traveller, Dylan, himself. Such palimpsestic storytelling renders Home Theatre more than the sum of its parts, but it also means that stories with less obvious linkages, such as ‘Journey to the Edge’ and ‘Blue Horse Overdrive’ feel a little out-of-place

Despite the bleak setting, these stories also celebrate small things: love, connection, and the pleasure of stale scones at the end of a trying day, and are leavened by flashes of darkly absurdist humour. My favourite, ‘Being Neighbourly’, is a blackly comic mise en scène inspired by e-mail notifications from Neighbourly. Covering everything from parking to feline larceny, it captures the small dramas of communal living as flash fiction: “PICK UP YOUR DOG POOP…Boxer dog missing, answers to Rudolf…Return of Rudolf on owner’s assurance to PICK UP POOP…Reliable dog walker/sitter needed ASAP…No judgement please, rehoming dog.” 

Dylan’s presence haunts the entire collection, both metaphorically and literally. In ‘Lightening’ there are hints of a future he is glad to have escaped, whilst in ‘The Ether of 1939’, he discloses ­– and creates –  connections with the apartment block’s history and his own family lineage to further secure his new present. I wanted to hear more of the marooned chrononaut’s tale than can be gleaned here, and I sincerely hope there is a novel in the works. In the meantime, I will satisfy myself by rereading this collection and finding the connections I missed the first time through.