2000<\/p>\n
How I Learned to Drive<\/p>\n
by Paula Vogel<\/p>\n
State Theatre South Australia<\/p>\n
Space<\/p>\n
Secret Bridemaids\u2019 Business<\/p>\n
by Elizabeth Coleman<\/p>\n
Playbox with State Theatre<\/p>\n
Optima Playhouse<\/p>\n
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n
In How I learned to Drive, American\u00a0 playwright\u00a0 Paula Vogel uses humour as a vehicle, you might say. And with it she takes us down some pretty dodgy back roads. If anyone were to tell you that this is a play about the intimate relationship between a seventeen year old girl and her forty five year old uncle you might feel the need to contact Crimestoppers. It is certainly taboo territory\u00a0 – and that usually means plenty of outrage and very little actual comprehension of the issues.<\/p>\n
With this play, which earned a Pulitzer Prize and widespread recognition for its author, there is a real attempt to get closer to the complexities of\u00a0 covert behaviour and its consequences. The setting is rural Maryland in the mid to late 1960s and, despite their jokily sexual names, Li\u2019l Bit and Uncle Peck are presented as individualised characters. Paradoxically, they are both more reflective and more aware than the unreconstructed society around them.<\/p>\n
Using what she calls the Male, Female and Teenage Greek Choruses, the playwright introduces a background of voices from members of the extended family. We are told that grandma was married at fourteen, chosen from a herd of sisters the way a lion takes a gazelle. Li\u2019l Bit\u2019s mother is both overprotective and fatalistic about the improprieties of her daughter\u2019s association with her sister\u2019s husband. The emotional landscape in which these events take place is itself a significant cause.<\/p>\n
The line between the natural and the unnatural is constantly blurred in ways that\u00a0 deprive us of the luxuries of straight-forward disapproval. Uncle Peck is not a fiend nor is Li\u2019l Bit unaware of her role in the unfolding events. We are shown aspects of their intimacy which are enriching\u00a0 and create a bond between them which contrasts positively with the society around them. But this serves only to complicate matters, of course, because Paula Vogel is unsparing in reminding that this is an abusive relationship which over seven years is profoundly damaging to the child and the man.<\/p>\n
In her simply staged production in the Space, State Theatre\u2019s artistic director Rosalba Clemente has captured much of the humanity of the text\u00a0 despite\u00a0 a tendency to coarsen some of the presentation to cartoon-like exaggeration. It is an awkwardness\u00a0 jn Vogel\u2019s text as well, I think,\u00a0 particularly in the opening section of the play. The text is frequently self-conscious with puns and weak gags as if the impulse to maintain comedy when the situation is so problematic is not a meaning of the play but an unfortunate by-product.<\/p>\n
For this reason the choruses – Rory Walker, Marlo Grocke and\u00a0 Penny Maegraith often strain at their task and the caricature becomes shrill. The central relationship is well presented, though, with fine performances from Lisa Hensley as Li\u2019l Bit and Nicholas Eadie as Uncle Peck. This is difficult material performed with courage and clarity and the effect of Vogel\u2019s unravelling exposition is as disturbing as it is intriguing.<\/p>\n
Dean Hill\u2019s set is almost too diagrammatic – a wide screen like a drive-in movie features a flat plain escaping to vanishing point forms a backdrop, while\u00a0 the chorus sits behind the two central players embellishing and commenting on the events. Along with the lugubrious quotations from the learner driver manual, musical director Christine Evans has followed Vogel\u2019s suggestions for musical garnish with pop songs as evocative to the period as they are dubious in their preoccupation with the legal age of consent.<\/p>\n
But while not all of Vogel\u2019s text works and this presents problem of staginess for Rosalba Clemente,\u00a0 the richly witty central motif of the driving lesson- occasion of the girl\u2019s first abuse at the age of eleven,\u00a0 but also metaphor of her power and capacity for self-determination – is complex and\u00a0 inventive and, steered by\u00a0 the accomplished performances of Lisa\u00a0 Hensley and Nicholas Eadie,\u00a0 provocative and instructive as well.<\/p>\n
Secret Bridesmaids\u2019 Business<\/em>,\u00a0 by Elizabeth Coleman, presently touring from Playbox, charts less controversial territory but is shrewdly observed comedy of manners all the same. The setting is a hotel suite the night before Meg\u2019s wedding. Her mother is fussing over the table settings and pew ribbons\u00a0 while bridesmaid Lucy, discovering the groom-to-be has been having a fling with a mutual friend, argues with fellow bridesmaid Angela about whether the bride should be Told All.<\/p>\n Coleman\u2019s script is an astute mix of edgy situation comedy and soothing humour but one never quite cancels the other. Her subject is really about friendship and the Nineties-Noughties version of sisterhood. It examines the pressures of mothers on daughters, and encapsulates the mix of emancipation and conventionality in thirty- something women. The dialogue has a distinctly Australian earthiness, which the actors clearly relish and the situation is that blend of farce and psychological realism which Alan Ayckbourn has so successfully exploited.<\/p>\n Director Catherine Hill manages these levels adeptly and is well served with a strong cast. Jane Hall as Meg, has both the\u00a0 perky assertiveness and emotional vulnerability of what we might call the Seachange heroine. It is nicely judged and the strain in the actor\u2019s voice\u00a0 inadvertantly provides additional authenticity. As Angela , Roz Hammond provides\u00a0 suitably goofy mugging- and a bit more in her spotlight soliliquy-\u00a0 while Kate Johnston\u2019s Lucy is persuasively direct. Valerie Bader navigates around the obvious as the fussing mother of the bride, Nicole Nabout\u2019s Naomi avoids the cliches as the Other Woman and Scott Irwin, as the feckless James, is well aware that the groom is almost completely marginal\u00a0 to events\u00a0 even when he has precipitated them.<\/p>\n With Shaun Gurtons\u2019s suavely functional set and its scrumptious lighting this comedy unfolds with well calibrated\u00a0 ease. And, rather like scripts such as Thank<\/em> God He met Lizzie<\/em>, Elizabeth Coleman has given us a distinctively Australian romantic comedy\u00a0 which is as much satiric of marriage and fidelity as it is celebratory. The problems raised in the play are not magically solved and yet there is no sense of capitulation either. This is a worldly play about an apparently conventional subject and it reveals a writer with every bit as much flair as comic dramatists such as\u00a0 Michael Frayn or Nora Ephron. The business of these bridesmaids may be kept secret but let us hope Elizabeth Coleman\u2019s smartly observed play is not.<\/p>\n The Adelaide Review, No.203, August, 2000, p.26.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 2000 How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel State Theatre South Australia Space Secret Bridemaids\u2019 Business by Elizabeth Coleman Playbox with State Theatre Optima Playhouse Reviewed by Murray Bramwell In How I learned to Drive, American\u00a0 playwright\u00a0 Paula Vogel uses humour as a vehicle, you might say. And with it she takes us down some pretty dodgy back roads. If anyone were to tell you that this is a play about the intimate relationship between a seventeen year old […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,14,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","category-state-theatre-company","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1566"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1567,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1566\/revisions\/1567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}