Adelaide
Theatre

Jesikah
by Phillip Kavanagh
State Theatre Company
The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre
May 27. Tickets : $18 – $36.
Bookings: BASS 131 246, bass.net.au
Duration : 75 minutes
Until May 31.

When he said “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes”, Andy Warhol didn’t even know about the internet. Now, anyone with a phone can communicate with multitudes they’ve never met – and call them followers and friends.

For this year’s featured production in State Theatre’s State Ed secondary school’s program, the company has commissioned a new work, Jesikah, from award-winning, emerging playwright Phillip Kavanagh. Jesikah is a high school student who, like Macbeth – the character she is rehearsing for her drama production – desperately wants to succeed.

She has vaulting ambition, and like the Scottish king’s, it definitely o’erleaps itself. Just how much is both a fascination and, at times, a challenge to our credulity as Jesikah, alienated from her staunchly loyal friend Denise, manipulates her mother and teacher and retreats into the narcissistic and grandiose world of her YouTube site, Jesikah’s Bedroom.

Director Nescha Jelk has created a crisp, stylish production with sumptuous lighting from Ben Flett and a well-judged sound design by Will Spartalis.
Olivia Zanchetta’s minimal set, built for thrift and portability for the production’s extensive schools touring, is pretty-in-pink with a single scroll stage mat and backdrop, enabling a large projection area for the live-action video feed which, appropriately, has Jesikah’s on-line image dwarfing and monstering her physical self.
Kate Cheel is excellent as Jesikah, restless, defiant, devious and paranoid. Dressed in a tartan school skirt, with matching red Doc Martins, she chatters in teenage patois, on the edge of caricature but not quite over it. Elizabeth Hay spars with her as Miss H, the ill-treated drama teacher, and as Jesikah’s flummoxed, under-assertive mother. As Denise, in fluffy jumper and carefully pleated skirt, Hay is the dutiful, unworldly A-grade student who unwittingly inflames Jesikah’s spiraling insecurity and resentment.

Kavanagh is probing various elements of self-performance in everyday life. Jesikah is a drama queen in every sense, moving from one role to the next, one impersonation to another. The play suggests that the pressure for young people to present themselves, and to excel, is ever accelerating, and, with the further distortions of the cyber world, personal disintegration is almost inevitable.

However, with its satiric edge and Mean Girls tropes, Jesikah short-circuits the characters’ motivations and emotional pressures. The friendship with Denise, and its complications, is unexplored, depriving audiences, especially the young target audience, with a chance to invest more in the unfolding situation. By crimping the real emotions of the piece, Jesikah becomes just a little too cool for school.

Murray Bramwell

“Ambitions of a teenage drama queen”, The Australian, May 29, 2014, p.16.