Constance Yorkshire
Eagle’s Nest Theatre
23 May 2009
Northcote Town Hall
In a week where even I actively watched an A Current Affair interview (thank you Tracy Grimshaw), a work like Constance Yorkshire is a curious reflection of our obsession with watching crims, freaks and bogans and hearing their side of the story.
Local playwright Graham Downey has set his story in an 1890 Melbourne theatre, where entrepreneur Mr George Risley (Phil Roberts) is presenting an evening in conversation with Miss Constance Yorkshire (Jess Hackett), recently acquitted of murdering the Lamb family. As interviewer and narrator, Riseley mixes questions with exposition to tell Miss Yorkshire’s tale. With her (recently deceased) father’s unstable four-storey house, her dad’s quirky inventions, a nail in Mr Lamb’s head and an unescapable fire, there’s plenty to wonder about.
The whodunit mystery of the evening is played well with an Agatha Christie deduction style of clues. However, it’s clear that Risley knows the truth and is going to tell us, which takes away one of the cornerstones of great mystery story telling. The best mysteries are a three-way race between the audience (reader/viewer), the protagonist and the writer to reveal the truth. A red herring, a credible alternative theory or reasonable doubt about Risley might help to keep the narrative moving forward and the audience on the edge of their seats.
However, the heart of this story is the parallel mystery of why Risley is presenting Miss Yorkshire. Is he doing it to prove the court wrong, expose the true culprit or cash in on Yorkshire’s celebrity? As he knows the truth of the deaths, we wonder if it’s really about Charlotte, and, as she is consistently indignant, argumentative and stubborn (she reminds me of Shane Paxton), we really have to wonder why.
Unfortunately, this part of the story isn’t clear until the end and, by then, it feels a bit too deus ex machina-convenient. With a script that is so dialogue and exposition heavy, the characters need to tell and show us their story – not expecting us to listen to all of the words. So, if Risley’s motives are in then text, it’s too easy to miss them, which leaves the performers and directors (Roberts co-directed the work with Shannon Woollard) with a world of subtext to play with. There was a noticeable and well-directed change of status between Risley and Yorkshire that helped to tweak our curiosity, but not enough of the subtle status and power shifts to make us really begin to question what was going on.
The relationship between George and Charlotte needs to be the core of the story, leaving the mystery as the subplot and comic diversion of the evening. Roberts is a compelling performer, but sometimes needed to be a detached narrator by stepping back and letting the story belong to Charlotte, especially early in the work when the audience are deciding if they care about her and want to discover the truth. Hackett’s Yorkshire had some lovely moments, but needed more light and shade. Her sustained anger wasn’t credible, as it didn’t show us why she decided to be there in the first place, if she cared what the audience believed or what she thought about the man letting her tell her tale. And both performers needed to react to the each other. Too often, it felt like they were listening for their cue, rather than letting the characters listen to what the other was saying and reacting to what they heard.
These issues usually iron our over time, but short seasons and short rehearsals too often leave terrific shows faltering before they take off. I hope that Eagle’s Nest Theatre are able to let Constance Yorkshire have another run, as it could soar.
This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.
