This haunting play celebrates the solidarity and strangeness of found family

Local playwright Angus Cameron has teamed up with Red Stitch for the world premiere of Luke – a disturbing, emotionally complex three-hander that weaves a provocative play of ideas into a psychological mystery of troubling currency.

I was bewildered by the opening sequence. Two adults race across a living room playing dress-ups. They’re engaged in some kind of private game, based on the Bolshevik assassination of the Romanovs during the Russian Revolution, but something about the scene feels off, inauthentic somehow.

A clever reason for this will remain an enigma until well after we discover that the pair are high school teachers in country Victoria.

It’s 2007, and Damon (Dion Mills) and Olena (Olga Makeeva) are unwinding at term’s end after a gruelling night of parent-teacher interviews. When Chris (Will Lonsdale) – the school’s 19-year-old rowing coach and a former student of Damon’s – joins them, the games continue.

Some of the playfulness is literary or historical – a relic of the ludic flamboyance essential to Damon’s pedagogic style. He’s an inspiring educator, discreetly gay, and his mentor-like relationship with Chris, who came out to Damon as a student, is tinged by affection and by a body of queer knowledge excluded by the official (read heteronormative) education system.

When conversation turns to a never-seen character, Luke – a year 11 student leaving the school after inappropriate attention from a member of staff – the game mutates through a series of twists, with a possible child sex abuse scenario, and its consequences, playing out over decades. Iain Sinclair’s direction guides three excellent performances.

Mills’ suspect teacher has the charisma, passion, idealism, and sheer eccentricity of a gifted educator. There’s no question he leaves a mark on his students: his scenes with Lonsdale’s Chris are tender and haunted – enlivened by the irrepressible joy they both take in the learning game, as well as the shadow of barely repressed desire.

Olena is the fulcrum of the play, and Makeeva is riveting as, through veiled parable and a clipped and embittered realism, the character weighs the truth of a situation in which the righteousness of her own acts is called into question.

She is a staunch counter to Chris – a young man heavily invested in his own righteousness, and solipsistic in the performance of it.

Luke tackles such uncomfortable subjects as the erotics of education and the ethics of making art from life.