2007

Theatre

Adelaide

Love

By Patricia Cornelius

Vitalstatistix

The Bakehouse Theatre,

255 Angas Street, Adelaide.

August 22. Until September 1.

Tickets $15 – $25.  Bookings Ph.8447 6211

“Love is a given”, observes writer Patricia Cornelius. ”We all believe we will feel it one day. Most of the time it is represented in a rather crass and ludicrous package but we buy the package anyway.” In the opening scene of her 2003 play Love, two young women, Tanya and Annie, declare their love to each other while still in prison. As the play progresses, their release means returning to a prison of a different kind – a downward spiral of addiction and prostitution, and the desperate attempt to stem that momentum.

Annie is nineteen and, despite a life of abuse, is still giddy with hope and the prospect of love. She responds keenly to Tanya, her “bloke”, a tough young lesbian who is as fiercely loyal as she is possessive. Tanya has plans – “with your looks and my organization”- to turn the system, and the tricks, to their advantage. But, when Lorenzo enters the picture, the love triangle soon becomes a Bermuda one.

Vitalstatistix director Catherine Fitzgerald has taken this prize-winning text and created a memorable production – well served by Mary Moore’s adaptable set of concrete blocks, steel frame beds and graffiti-ed iron, Sue Grey-Gardner’s aptly jangled lighting and Catherine Oates’s evocative music. The performances are excellent. Anni Lindner, as Tanya, has a sinewy toughness that barely conceals her yearning to be needed. She also painfully recognizes that she is exploiting love, even as she denies it. As Lorenzo, Joseph Del Re skillfully works the play’s sardonic comedy with a disarming boyishness which is both sinister and laughably manipulative. It is a mercurial and convincing performance and the scene where he and Lindner are gathered like dogs at the door, screaming for Annie to turn a trick so they can score, is harrowing.

Annie, as the play mordantly reminds us, is both the object of desire and, as she puts it, an ATM machine for her lovers. She might well have called herself the cash cow. Ellen Steele’s Annie is an innocent, degraded by circumstance but still desperate for love. That she is slowly disappearing up the arms of her parasitic suitors is left for us to painfully observe. Love is not a tourist’s view of the lower depths, as such underclass dramas can tend to be, but a powerfully sustained and insightful portrait of dignity under terrible siege. This first-rate production reminds us that, in its often cruel and garbled contradictions, romantic love can be the most addictive drug of all.

Murray Bramwell

“Love is an addiction” The Australian, August 24, 2007, p.14.