Erin Harrington reviews Long Ride Home, written and directed by Jack McGee for Squash Co. Arts Collective, at Little Andromeda, 16 November 2023.
If you want to have a hard conversation with someone, everyone from internet strangers to expensive therapists will tell you it’s a good idea to do it in car where you’re stuck together but don’t have to sit face-to-face. Squash Co. Arts Collective’s two-hander Long Ride Home applies the same principles to a slightly sweatier form of transport. Twenty-something siblings Cate (Anna Barker) and David (Dylan Hutton), who haven’t seen each other for while, jump on their pushbikes – mounted cleverly on stage – and talk while they pedal to a party at the house of an old high school friend.
Cate, the more serious of the two, has a frustrating but impactful job in public transport planning. She has deeply rooted friendships, and has kept the home fires burning in Wellington by nurturing relationships with their parents and grandmother. Big brother David is a bit more cavalier, charming but kind of a jerk. He’s been off in London, attempting a career in acting while doing the ‘working in a pub and taking weekends in Italy’ thing. Despite regular performative privilege-checking he takes his relative freedom for granted.
Writer-director Jack McGee’s script establishes a convincing dynamic between the two. Their conversation in the first act is full of competitive and intimate yet slightly probing banter. As they hoon around Wellington’s hills in the dark the pair carefully test each other’s boundaries, getting a sense of who this other, only partially-familiar adult is. Shared memories solidify bonds, but childhood rivalries manifest as adult tensions. Occasionally one will pull away on their bike, and the lighting design will put the other into darkness – a simple but effective conceit. The room is warm and receptive. Audience members audibly respond to the action with frequent laughter or mutters of recognition.
This first act sets up some compelling themes and metaphors: trees, roots, and family homes; the singular striving self versus the family unit; the graft of grinding uphill and the earned joy of zooming downhill; the work of moving alongside someone, challenging them or holding them back. Through it all there’s the tension between the one who leaves and the one who stays, and how blood ties translate (or not) into responsibility and reciprocity. I love Cate’s comment, roughly paraphrased, that she has to keep learning to love Te-Whanganui-A-Tara – that relationships with places, as well as people, take work. This half ends on a lovely, gentle image: when they arrive at the party David (impulsive) wants to playfully climb a tree, but Cate (responsible, a bit cross) knows they are late and wants to head in.
There’s a shift in the second act, set a couple of years later, and this is where I need to put a big spoiler tag.
David is back home, and the sibling relationship has soured – for Cate at least. As they cycle home from another party, half a bottle of scrumpy rolling around in the bicycle basket, Cate is forced from the road. She takes the opportunity to share some big news, and also to offload.
Much of this half happens at the side of the road, as Cate reads out a very, very long handwritten letter, and David is forced to listen and silently react. This conceit doesn’t work for me dramaturgically: it’s didactic and static, it minimises the dramatic potential of the scene, it gives us little to look at, it doesn’t serve character, and (most importantly) it tells instead of shows. Once Cate has said her piece she grabs David’s bike and leaves – and that’s the play. What?! my friend and I say. Come back! Where are you going?
I say this with enormous love and enthusiasm for the project: this play isn’t finished. There’s dinner but no dessert. I’m not averse to a diptych, but there’s a third act missing. So much of the thematic, narrative and character-based groundwork laid in the first half is left unfulfilled. Even when considered as a play of two mirrored halves, a conversation between two acts, Long Ride Home doesn’t answer its own questions, and it’s unsatisfying.
I do really love what this play is trying to do. I’m deeply engaged in the relationship and the conceit. I enjoy the performances, especially Barker and Hutton’s familiar but uneasy rapport. I laugh, I groan, I feel a sense of bone-deep recognition. You can feel that the audience is fully invested; the applause at the end is enthusiastic and sustained. I feel good for having seen it, and I want it to succeed – but we’re not quite home yet.
Long Ride Home runs at Little Andromeda until Saturday 18 November.
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