With a cast and crew comprising predominantly of Kosky’s efforts last season, Mourning’s atmosphere is not as light as Tartuffe, but one of death, guilt and revenge.  Stellar performances by Melita Jurisic as Lavinia and Kris McQuade as her mother compliment Paul Healy’s constant eerie soundscape and, of course, Kosky’s less than conventional approach.

The action centres the estranged Mannon family: rich, powerful and aloof. Brigadier-General Mannon (Anthony Phelan) returns home to an unfaithful wife (McQuade) and a dutiful, but hateful daughter (Jurisic). The daughter loves her father, hates the mother, and the mother hates her back. The father loves the mother, but the mother hates him too. To throw further fuel, the second child, Orin (Mitchell Butel) loves the mother, hates the father, but loves his sister. O’Neill has prepared a soup with more spice than vegetables.

And so, there’s a murder (or two) and a suicide (or two), love, holidays to exotic South Islands, tea, incest, cocktails, flowers and guns- this is the mix that adds to the bitter humour that’s carefully entwined into this disturbing dramatic conglomeration- usually at all the most inappropriate times. In one scene, the two children return from murdering their mother’s lover, then take off their coats and hats, hanging them up as if they’ve returned home from school.

Dark and eerie, Mourning stops for no one, gives no one a chance to catch their breath (except in the twenty minute and thirty minute intervals), and continues to abuse without recourse. Warned as they enter the theatre that they will be subjected to high levels of noise, the audience should probably have turned back then. Healy’s feverish soundscape begins with a crackling record and a harmonica, soon progressing into piercing electrified elements that don’t give up (audience members were muffling their ears). But this all adds to the tension that’s created by O’Neill’s intrigue, the actors’ talent and Kosky’s vision- a tension so strong that you walk out with your hands over your ears, eyes and mouth, and with traces of armrest under your fingernails.

Kosky says that if you take the literal route to Mourning, the classic melodrama filled with genuine emotion and pain, you turn it into something akin to a stage version of Gone With The Wind. The only thing in common between Mourning and the aforementioned story is something about “giving a damn”- Kosky seems to not. When he was booed at the Sydney Opera House in 1995 for his production of Nabucco, his only comments were “I had two or three seconds of ‘Oh my God’ and then I loved it.”

This gun-ho, take-no-prisoners and whatever-you-do-don’t-compromise approach to theatre runs like an artery through his current work, pumping a coarse, crude blood, thick and dark. Mourning is long (4 hours with two intervals), but is a window into a surreal pyschoesque world of pseudo-love and predominant hate. It’s scope extends beyond the set (complete with the mangled head of a wolf) through the scratched theatre walls, and into our own homes like some eerie ghost from Part III (aptly named The Haunted): it’s something you can’t easily switch off, if you ever can.

Review by Grant Scicluna