This a terrific production of a wonderfully rich, wonderfully funny play.
Written by Jen Silverman and directed by Lee Lewis, it’s a beautifully sophisticated use of the comic trope of the outsider who shakes up the status quo.
Sharon has taken a new roommate, Robyn. Sharon is conservative, inexperienced and uptight. She lives in Iowa, where she says there is no culture – she’s from Illinois. Robyn is from New York and is street-smart, experienced and, it would appear, more self-assured.
One of the joys of the piece is its presentation of the friendship between two middle-aged women. Sharon may feel that she’s slipping out of view, but the play says not so fast, and hauls her centre stage. Robyn warns her not to become old before her time. It’s a glorious celebration of second chances.
As Sharon and Robyn, Lucy Bell and Belinda Bromilow are utterly superb, creating characters who are both comic magic and entirely grounded in Truth.
The setup may seem sitcom, but don’t be fooled. The play is an absolutely engaging investigation of identity and how it’s created.
Is our identity unchanging? Or is it fluid? Asked if she is a bisexual, Robyn replies we look for labels for ourselves but sometimes they don’t really fit. Robyn, after all, is an ex-smoker – after this next cigarette.
Is our identity determined by the role in which society casts us? A bewildered Sharon says she was once a wife, but is no longer; was once a mother, but has become redundant; is now a roommate, but….
Or do we have genuine agency? Are we free to create ourselves? Robyn has made some pottery dolls. Made people. (And breakable people.) She jokingly calls them voodoo dolls, evoking – just momentarily – a sense of the small spirit that might make such tiny parodies. And then there’s what Robyn has been doing for money, entailing a rather cavalier approach to self-invention.
And, if identity is a perpetual becoming, is this liberating or simply disorientating? Is it growth or is it just instability? Is there any outside certainty to guide the changes or to measure them against? Should there be? Robyn wonders if she has influenced her daughter too much. Sharon wonders if she has influenced her son at all.
But Sharon bemoans that she’s always been told what to do – by her mother, by her ex-husband. She senses, that in the making of a self, some of her self must be involved. Are we condemned to always define who we are by reference to others, either aligning with their expectations or rejecting them?
I can’t repeat it, of course, but the final line is a playfully provocative invitation to consider how we might embrace that greatest of Life’s opportunities, self-making.
If free to make ourselves, what is most intoxicating? The sheer freedom of it? Or the sheer miracle of self?
Both sassy and sad, the final line asks how grand our vision of self might be.
Paul Gilchrist
The Roommate by Jen Silverman
at Ensemble until 25 July
Image by Brett Boardman
Theatre Red 
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