A COMEDY THAT FAIRLY GLOWS IN THE DARK
Author: ANGELA BENNIE
Date: 22/04/1992
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald

LOUIS Nowra's semi-autobiographical Cosi begins in darkness and ends in
darkness. The light, and life, in between comes in the main from the stage
lights of a theatre. This is where the Nowra-figure, Lewis, is attempting
to put on a play, and it is this process which is Cosi's. It is a strong
image, and makes a strong statement. As far as Cosi - and, one may make
the inference, Nowra - is concerned, life and light comes from the
theatre; anything outside it is darkness.

But in Cosi, Lewis's theatrical endeavour is no normal theatrical
endeavour- if there is such a thing. Lewis has been engaged by a mental
hospital's social worker to direct a play with the inmates. One of these,
Roy, a manic-depressive, has long dreamt of performing in Mozart's opera
Cosi fan Tutte and insists that now is the time and now is the place.

Despite Lewis's protestations that none of the cast can either sing or
understand Italian, Roy considers these mere irrelevancies and demands
with a flourish that they begin immediately. Cosi is on its hilarious way.

Barry Otto's Roy is a marvellous creation, all tics and obsession, arms
flung to heaven in theatrical ecstasy or wobbling through space as if to
grasp the very ether. His single-mindedness never wavers; his delight and
his despair give the stage a fragile edginess that is at once pathetic,
grand and desperately sad. What is more, he is very funny.

He is not the only one. There is David Wenham's Doug, a pyromaniac.
Stabbing the air with lighted cigarettes, shedding lighted matches around
him like so many golden scales, Wenham's Doug has the light of madness in
his eye and in his starved, taut little body, right to the last spike of
his ragged, carroty head; yet, through meticulous attention to detail,
this actor creates a Doug that is wounded inside, human, proud and
profoundly lost.

There is David Field's social worker (met with involuntary groans of
recognition from the audience), Bob Baines's secretive Henry, Celia
Ireland's obsessive-compulsive and Cherry (who counts into the thousands
in moments of crisis). In fact, thanks to a cast which has responded with
alacrity and insight to Nowra's generous humour, and director Adam Cook's
determination to bring that out to the full, Cosi offers up a world of the
most extraordinary, ordinary people; and a hilarious situation-comedy, to
boot.

But even a situation-comedy that is very funny, well written, well acted,
well-directed, you name it, is far too long if it lasts nearly 3 1/2 hours
of three long, somewhat rambling acts. It must have something else to
sustain it other than humour.

There are hints of it in Cosi: a surreality that is the outside world, the
world out there beyond the theatre, beyond the madhouse, where pigs squeal
with terror as they are slaughtered, where the smell of the abattoirs is
the perfume that infuses Lewis's back yard, where bottles of home brew
explode arbitrarily, where Mozart is considered a reactionary fascist, and
constancy and loyalty are negotiable items in human affairs.

Hints of a darkness that lies beyond the lights: the real world. Cosi is
the second part of Nowra's autobiographical trilogy. Will the third now
move into that darkness?