2008
Blue/Orange
by Joe Penhall
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Dunstan Playhouse, July 8.
Beetle Graduation
by Susan Rogers
Brink Productions
The Space, July 19.
The Mistress
by Arnold Wesker
A Solitary Choice
by Sheila Duncan
Holden Street Theatres, July 23.
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
After the lull in proceedings since the Adelaide Festival, theatre has returned with a range of engaging works about alpha doctors, alpha mothers and two women with very little say at all.
Blue/Orange, by English playwright Joe Penhall, is ostensibly about the legal and procedural problem of sectioning – putting mental patients on a 28 day restraint against their wishes. Penhall is raising questions about the criteria for sanity and whether seeing an orange as blue is a verification or just a personal opinion. The real problem for Christopher, the young black man in question (memorably performed by Robert Jordan) is the spat that develops between two self-serving psychiatrists – Flaherty (Renato Musolino making a welcome debut for State) and Smith (swinishly played by the capable William Zappa). Neither doctor can agree and each has petty career interests to consider and a vengeful bone to pick with the other.
Director Adam Cook has encouraged the satiric elements – particularly in the wolfish comedy from Zappa – and designer Victoria Lamb’s glassy postmodern set has, with its windowless brick walls, echoes of asylums past. But Penhall’s play, having set up some serious questions about ethics, economic rationalist policies, and the fact that one man’s blue might be a poor man’s orange, is ultimately unsatisfactory. Its depiction of the doctors is caricatured to the point of implausibility and the opportunistic shifts in plot and tone are an indication that he is ready to trade anything, and everything, for a bitter laugh.
Susan Rogers’ Beetle Graduation is a far more solemn business, at times a little too much so. Marking Brink’s return after the highly successful Festival work, When The Rain Stops Falling, director Chris Drummond has diligently prepared this production. From Wendy Todd’s pleasingly minimal décor and Geoff Cobham’s illuminating lighting design to the two fine performances, Beetle Graduation is impressively accomplished.
As the Mother, lording it over her besieged only child, Carmel Johnson convincingly depicts a woman devoted to her 7 year old child and competing with her at the same time. She cruelly calls her Beetle as if somehow to harden her exoskeleton in preparation the world. These flashbacks alternate with the daughter, whose real name is Miranda, now forty, tending to her peevish Prospero mother in the last stages of cancer. Michaela Cantwell brings a perceptive range to her portrait of the daughter, from her child-Caliban chanting Beetle spells to her weary adult patience with her flamboyant mother’s perversity.
Susan Rogers’ text, a one-hour segment of a larger trilogy, is an often powerful evocation of an archetypal relationship. There are many particulars which are direct and recognizable but, in the monologues particularly, there is a tendency to poeticising which disperses the impact. Beetle Graduation has a sturdiness that has no need for gilding.
Holden Street Theatre Directors’ Season has returned for 2008 with a double bill of monologues of women under the influence. Samantha in Arnold Wesker’s The Mistress is a London designer alone in her studio downing the vodkas waiting for her married lover to ring. As her spirits sink she apostrophizes her design dummies – Jessica and Babushka – and they mock, berate and sympathise with her in reply. As Sam, Martha Lott is valiant but has a difficult task bringing Wesker’s ungainly and sometimes turgid text to life and director Phillip Parslow has permitted a shrillness as substitute for energy. Written in the late 80s Wesker’s play has, even in its title, a dated 60s ring to it – and it doesn’t ring true.
By contrast, Adelaide writer Sheila Duncan’s A Solitary Choice is vivid in its characterisation and theme. A young mother working for a finance company, Ruth’s life is in doldrums when she hears some Bolivian flute players busking in the Mall. Her affair with one of them, fifty-something Carlos, and subsequent secret pregnancy, has a slightly dotty Shirley Valentine aspect to it, but it astutely prepares us for the play’s more ambitious concerns.
Sheila Duncan’s excellent script – first performed some eight years ago – has, particularly in Michael Allen’s well-judged direction and Tamara Lee’s appealing performance, an unexpected impact as a young woman working in the material world is forced to consider not only bringing a new life into the world, but starting a new life herself. The unacknowledged realities women face with pregnancy are candidly considered and the playwright reminds us that, for all the society’s concerned talk about these issues, the experience is a lonely one.
“Blues, beetle and drunkards” The Adelaide review, No. 342, August, 2008, p.14