1998

My Vicious Angel

Christine Evans

Vitalstatistix

Waterside

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

With its charter as a National Women’s Theatre, Vitalstatistix has set itself a large task. But with Christine Evans’ new play My Vicious Angel the claim has taken tangible form. This fine work has been brought to life- given wings, as the playwright puts it- by an able cast and production team.

Imogen Thomas has created a simple, and portable, set consisting of a vertical steel climbing frame draped with light toned fabric and, at centre stage, a prosthetic looking hospital gurney. These form the two axes of the play. In the bed is Pearl, a trapeze artiste immobilised by a fall from gracefulness. And, climbing all over the frame, like it was a kid’s jungle gym,  Merle her twin, dead in a house fire but present to Pearl in memory : of their family life and numerous psychic secrets. Merle is an unquiet, agitated spirit and Pearl’s world is not exactly her oyster either.

As Merle, Lucia Mastrantone has a volatile energy which navigates the subtle verbal eddies of Evans’ crisply poetic text. Like all close siblings the twins remember and mimic- literally parroting the family cage bird, their broadly accented mother and the laconic tones of their father, a sailor lost to the sea. Trapped in a kind of locked-in syndrome, Caroline Mignone’s Pearl is a match for her fellow actor providing a visual and verbal anchor for Merle’s aerial ramblings.

Essential to the interplay between the sisters is the music written and adapted by Christine Evans and performed by saxophonist Boyd and accordionist Guy Freer. Ranging from free-form new jazz riffs to melancholy sea shanties, from frenetic tangoes to  Napoleonic ballads, the music infuses the production with a current of feeling that is indivisible from the text. Both Mastrantone and Mignone sing well and the repeated cadences of Lowlands, My Lowlands Away are profoundly affecting in their simplicity.

This production has managed an airy lightness that only the best and most intuitive direction can provide. Rosalba Clemente has again shown her gift for working with performers and blending elements with intelligence and good judgement. Geoff Cobham, ever resourceful in his lighting work, bathes the production in mellow glow and even resorts to some well-placed, if slightly disconcerting, pyromania.

My Vicious Angel is a creditable example of good theatre process. From Christine Evans verbally acute text, skilfully groomed and shaped by dramaturg Keith Gallasch to the perceptive direction and performances, a new work has been splendidly served. I was pleased to learn from Vitals’ Artistic Director Catherine Fitzgerald that the set can fold neatly into a Handivan, because this Angel may be vicious but she is also funny, familiar and shrewdly profound. And she is moving. Back for a return season, one hopes and then on the road to show that Adelaide is still making theatre to gladden and amaze.

The Adelaide Review, No.179, August, 1998, p.36.