The William May Corporation
24 October 2010
Atheneum
carriefisher.com
Review by Josephine Giles
Tell your friends you have seen Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking and chances are they will want to know about the piles of
cocaine that reputedly dotted the Star
Wars trilogy sets. But Fisher, who will forever be defined by her portrayal
of Princess Leia in those block-buster movies, offers much more in this show
than a string of sordid anecdotes of celebrity drug abuse.
By the end of Wishful
Drinking you will probably not know a
lot more detail about the life your new besty Carrie than you have read in the
tabloids or seen on talk shows. We
all know she was born of Hollywood royalty Debby Reynolds and Eddy Fisher; that
she struggled with addictions to various substances after her early stardom in
the Star Wars movies; that she was in a tumultuous relationship with, then
married, then divorced the singer-songwriter Paul Simon; that she wrote a
number of bestselling novels - one of which, Postcards From The Edge was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep
and Shirley Maclaine; and that she has become somewhat of a pin-up girl for bi-polar
disorder, the illness she has wrestled with for many years, but that has
provided the fodder for some of her best writing.
What you will come away with, however, is an appreciation of
Carrie’s significant talent as an actress and writer as she fleshes out the
above in a highly entertaining oral memoir / slide night. Arriving on stage singing “Happy Days
Are Here Again”, tossing glitter into the audience, Carrie kicks off her shoes
and settles into her cosy lounge room of a set which is dominated by a centrally
placed large screen. Demonstrating skills borrowed from the best
stand-ups, she establishes an early intimacy with her audience with a hilarious
question and answer session about sudden death and she soon has us well and
truly warmed upped.
Once it’s established that we’re all best friends, Carrie,
with the assistance of projections, leads us through the story of her life,
loves and illness. From her
statement “If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is
unacceptable”, we learn that Carrie has not just the capacity, but the
necessity to laugh at her life. So for all the considerable wit with numerous
LOL moments - plus the pleasure of being entertained by someone we have all known
for so long - we end up with admiration for Carrie’s capacity to endure, and
create some sort of sense out of, a chaotic life lived out under the spotlight.
Carrie’s delivery is conversational and seemingly off the
cuff, but this is merely evidence of her understated virtuosity. This is a
tightly scripted show, polished through productions across America since 2006. The
recipient of various awards for solo performance, Wishful Drinking is the
work of a gifted storyteller.
This review appears on AussieTheatre.com
