Review: L'Amante Anglaise

L'Amante Anglaise
La Mama
19 July 2015
La Mama Theatre
to 26 July
lamama.com.au

The novella L'Amante Anglaise by Marguerite Duras was first published in 1967 and Duras adapted it for stage in 1968. The stage version is two interviews about a murder that was discovered when body parts, except the head, were found on trains that all passed through one spot. It's currently back at La Mama because too many people missed it last year.

As the murderer, Claire, confessed before it opens, the mystery of the story is who she is and why she killed her deaf-mute cousin. Claire's husband of 20 years, Pierre, is interviewed first, setting expectations and questions about Claire.

Unlike monologue, where characters tend to talk to the audience (and done extraordinarily well at Red Stitch this month in Dead Centre and Sea Wall), the presence of the interviewer gives the audience the closeness of fly-on-the-wall observation without the emotional intimacy of being in the characters' heads. This distance lets us ask far more than the interviewer does and more than the characters want.

The story is filled with answers, but few, if any, to what we ask.

Director Laurence Strangio has cut back the production so that all is left is characters experiencing the story as it happens. 

With indicative costumes and a black empty stage, each sit, listen and react.  The world is in the text and the text is in the hands and souls of the actors.

Jillian Murray and Robert Meldrum are the actors, each acting as interviewer to the other. These are performances where actor and technique disappear. Both are totally in the moment and not even a split second ahead of their charcters. (Listen and react.) Pierre and Claire know their truth and secrets and keep them from interviewer and audience. There are no cheeky hints to let us into their heads or to know more than they do. And there's nothing to ensure that audience, or interviewer, ask the right questions.

L'Amante Anglaise is disconcerting in how it engages. It's no more than two people in a space, but the world they create is vivid and real, and Pierre and Claire are unforgettable.

This was on  AussieTheatre.com .

Review: Stripped

Stripped
La Mama
7 March 2012
La Mama Theatre
to 18 March

Writer, actor and creator Caroline Lee remains an unmissable force in independent theatre.  Stripped is a solo performance about the nakedness and exposure of death that strips away the pretence of performance to its core of raw emotion.

Working with her long-time collaborator and director Laurence Strangio and lighting designer Paul Jackson, this is Lee's stage adaption of the novel she started when studying Professional Writing at RMIT, and which was serialised in Meanjin and supported by the Marion Eldridge Award and City of Melbourne's arts grants.

Told through interconnecting first-person narratives, it starts as Lillian, a lawyer, is dying from cancer and her sister Sophie, a stripper, faces her own trauma. It's a fascinating adaption that left me wanting to read the novel.

As the writer, Lee's performance comes from such a closeness to her characters that she can concentrate on the subtleties that let her share this deep understanding with the audience, and Strangio shapes the story and brings a physicality that embodies the driving emotion of each scene.

On a coffin-sized light box stage, Lee evokes Melbourne from an inner-city strip club to Chadstone (where no one wants to die). Lit mostly from below, Jackson's lighting exposes the human without the niceties of make up and flattering light (think what you look like with a torch under your face) which continues to bring the internal to the surface.

Yet, for all its heartfelt intelligence and emotional rawness, the text is distracting. Eyes and ears process language so differently and what is exquisite on a page can seem forced on the stage, as we don't need the descriptive adverbs and gorgeous metaphors to create the world or show reaction. There's a moment when a character says "I walked gingerly" and my inner editor grabbed her red pen; telling what we can see takes away from the character and brings too much attention back to the words.

Lee writes stunning words, but stage stories are driven by emotion, and another edit to tighten will free its characters even more, while the words will still shine in print.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com

Photo by Pia Johnson

Review: Mag and Bag

Mag and Bag
La Mama
7 November 2010
La Mama Courthouse

Mag and Bag live in a suburb that's still so working class that the tins are home brand, the Herald Scum St Mary poster has pride of place on the bar fridge and being called a Liberal is far worse than be called a cunt.

Barry Dickens wrote Mag and Bag in the late 70s and, even with some hip Latham and Abbot jokes, it's comforting to to see that little changes. There still nothing as good as cup of tea, curlers still create the best hair dos and bloody nature strips always have to be mowed. And I for one am looking forward to being a nutty old lady whose language will make the neighbours blush.

In a gorgeously designed house of chicken wire and op shop paintings, are two old women who have no one left to fight with. Like grotesque panto dames, they bicker, fight and abuse each other with a verbal dexterity only outweighed by their love. If it's true that we can really only be total cows to the people who love us, then Mag and Bag are BFFs... or they they believe that fighting is better than being old and forgotten. It's easy to laugh at swearing old ladies, but Camelina Di Gulglielmo and Maria Portsi let us see the regret behind the laughs.

Director Laurence Strangio (who directed Jackie Smith's The Flood last year) again captures the playwright's voice with an authenticity that lets us see the characters with the love Dickens had creating these two old horrors. So even if we might not want them as neighbours, watching them is a laugh-out-loud joy.

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: The Flood

The Flood
Finucane & Smith and La Mama
6 December 2009
La Mama Theatre

A trip to La Mama can be a long hour where you look forward to browsing the Readings sale table and choosing a pastry at Brunetti. The Flood isn’t one of those shows. It is the best piece of new theatre I’ve seen this year.

Jackie Smith is best known for her divine direction of Finucane & Smith's The Burlesque Hour and other wonders, but she has written a script that puts many writers to shame and I’m wondering if she was hanging out with the Shelleys and their friends in Geneva in 1816.

Gothic is more than old Cure albums and spider web tattoos or even knowing when Mary Shelley conceived the idea for Frankenstein. Gothic literature explores the horror within ourselves and society. It has spawned many a B grade monster, but the authentic stuff really makes your soul shudder. Finucane & Smith’s Gotharama helped me past my false conceptions of Gothic, but The Flood makes me want to start wearing copious amounts of eyeliner and abandon my habit of wearing bright colours.

Two estranged sisters and their demented mother spend a night on their family property. They are isolated, spooked and full of secrets. It’s an Australian Gothic horror that defines the genre.

The story surprises, shocks and still keeps its secrets. It lets us laugh, but never undermines the characters, who are those rare fictional beings so real you know them. They evoke love and hate in equal parts, as you want to stand up and slap them, but can’t because you understand everything they are doing.

The script is remarkable, but it shines with Laurence Strangio’s contained direction; Bronwyn Pringle’s lighting and the Sisters Hayes’s design that creates the most space ever seen in La Mama, while still making us feel cramped; and Natasha Anderson’s sound design makes you want someone brave to go outside and check the rising river.

Which leaves the cast: Shirley Cattunar, Caroline Lee and Maude Davey. I’m at a loss for words. They never let us see the acting.

The Flood will move to bigger theatres, but none will have you in the living room with them or capture the cramped and spooked atmosphere of La Mama. So see it now. It’s sad and oppressive and holds your heart in your throat as you beg to know truth, but know the truth will hurt too much to know. See it. See it. See it.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com.