Tag Archives: Joanna Murray-Smith

The Female of the Species

8 Nov

The dramatist is the natural enemy of the theorist. Whereas the dramatist delights in the presentation of multiple voices, the theorist subsumes all voices to their singular vision of the world.

In The Female of the Species, Joanna Murray-Smith gives us Margot Mason, a provocateur feminist in the tradition of, say, Germaine Greer or Clementine Ford. To simultaneously poke and praise this type of personality has been in the literary zeitgeist since at least John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp in the late 70’s. But the dramatic form is perfect for reminding us of the vitality of complexity in the face of soul-shrinking reductionism. And, by choosing the particular genre of farce, Murray-Smith gives us something quite special.

Farce is one of the most difficult of genres to perform, especially a piece like this – one which invites high energy physicality but also requires close attention to the witty, erudite dialogue. With a terrific cast directed by Erica Lovell, this production pulls it off, giving us a hilarious, thought-provoking evening of theatre.

Murray-Smith’s protagonist is a superb creation, an incendiary combination of social warrior and self-interest. She’s played brilliantly by Lucy Miller, who gives the character gravitas, scorn and passion (the last of these transcending the temptation to present intellectuals as mere pedants, obsessed with verbal precision.) 

Margot proudly owns the moniker provocateur. She’s certainly provoked Molly, a young student who turns up uninvited to her country house. Jade Fuda is wonderful as Molly, positioning her beautifully between vulnerability and determination. Molly points out that Margot’s published works contradict each other, that she’s just seeking attention. The celebrity writer is unfazed. Her books are not commandments for Life, they’re invitations to thought. (This is despite her deep contempt for her daughter’s more conventional life choices. Lib Campbell plays the utterly exhausted young mother of three in suitable, gorgeous hyperbole.)    

But back to the play’s interrogation of the provocateur. One of the great questions of the intellectual life is Should you only write the Truth? Anyone with any intellectual humility appreciates that a truly serious commitment to Truth might condemn you to silence. But what would that gain? So you compromise. You tell yourself you’ll write the Truth as it appears to you, limited and flawed though that will inevitably be. It’s what you have to offer to the conversation, another stick among many thrown onto the communal fire. But if it’s the conversation, the fire, that’s important, what does it matter what you throw into the mix? After all, the deliberately inflammatory might just shake things up, make the fire burn that bit more fiercely, push back the darkness a little further, hold back the cold a little longer…

Which leads me to another great tension in the intellectual life, that between followers and leaders. We’re in awe of those who can express things neatly, who can tie up the world’s loose ends with some all-encompassing theory. But to mistake what they say for Truth is to confuse the small solidity of the stick with the dangerous vitality of the fire. Hold on too tightly to that dried out old piece of wood and watch the desiccated hollowness spread up your arm and wither your whole life.

Murray-Smith gives Margot a chain of books with curious catchy titles. Her most famous is The Cerebral Vagina, but listen closely for her most recent title. She’s toying with The Female of the Species, but in the play’s closing moments she comes up with another title, one that is gloriously provocative.

I started by suggesting farce is extremely difficult. It’s difficult because it makes so little effort at truthfulness. Instead, it asks us to revel in its very artificiality. And it’s this delightful artificiality that makes farce an ideal vehicle for the examination of the artificiality of our grand narratives. We enjoy them so, but they’re not Life.  

Paul Gilchrist

The Female of the Species by Joanna Murray-Smith

Presented by Rogue Projects

At Old Fitz until 23 November

oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Noni Carroll

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Uncle Vanya

1 Aug

This is a classic play; it’s very funny and deeply humane.

Directed by Mark Kilmurry, this is the second production of the play I’ve seen this year. I’d happily see it again.

Chekhov follows the usual comic trope of outsiders disrupting the stable world of convention. (Think Benedict and Don John arriving in Messina in Much Ado.) Chekhov’s twist is that the interlopers don’t energise the original inhabitants, they enervate them.

Professor Serebryakov and his young wife, Yelena, have come to live at the family estate, and they bring with them indolence. Vanya realises it’s contagious, but can’t remain immune.

Though written in late 19th century Russia, the play is provocatively relevant. It juxtaposes two questions our society continues to wrestle with: Who am I? versus What is to be done? Vanya thinks he’s a failure, that his life has been a waste. Understandably, he’d like to blame others. But is this really the way forward?

Joanna Murray-Smith’s adaption retains the original setting (there’s a samovar, there are peasants) but the language is our modern vernacular, allowing Chekhov’s brilliance to shine.

Under Kilmurry’s direction, a terrific cast honour Chekhov’s famed honesty and truthfulness.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, Chekhov creates a confronting beauty. Everyone is unfortunate, flawed and foolish – and still utterly lovable. (Even the pompous old professor, played wonderfully by David Lynch; his awkward, explanation-requiring, Gogol joke is comic gold.) Everyone’s in love with the wrong person. No one’s advice is quite right for anyone else. I don’t think this is a spoiler, but proceed with this paragraph at your own risk. Sonya’s beautiful final speech might be right for her, but can it really mean that much for her Uncle Vanya? But he accepts it, in silence; it’s what his niece can bring to the table, and if he has grown at all through the events of the play, he’s learnt to listen without criticism.  

Yalin Ozucelik as Vanya offers an irresistible figure of both hilarity and pathos. Chantelle Jamieson as Yelena initially plays indolence in the key of annoyance, a surprising choice, but one which pays off magnificently, delivering a second act of intensely moving vulnerability. Tim Walter, the visiting doctor who sets the women’s hearts afire, beautifully balances charm and dissolution. Abbey Morgan as Sonya offers a performance that is gloriously natural, an encapsulation of the Chekhovian genius; humanity in its unadorned simplicity, in its labyrinthine complexity, in its troubled passage through the sea of time, guided by hope and threatened by despair.

Paul Gilchrist

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, adapted by Joanna Murray-Smith

at Ensemble until 31 August

ensemble.com.au

Image by Prudence Upton

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Switzerland

8 May

This is an extraordinarily intriguing, extraordinarily odd play.

Written by Joanna Murray-Smith, and first produced in 2014 by the Sydney Theatre Company, it’s since been produced around the world.

It presents the novelist Patricia Highsmith as she is visited in her Swiss home by an emissary from her American publisher.

Highsmith was a real person, the writer of many novels, including those featuring the protagonist Tom Ripley. (Admission: If it hadn’t been for the Matt Damon film, I probably would know nothing about either the real person or the fictional one.)

Ripley – as even myopic theatre reviewers like myself know – is talented. He is a master of deceit, seduction and, most of all, murder. In creating Ripley, Highsmith was on to a winner – or so the critics and the sales suggest. (To me, it all seems simply bizarre. Or untruthful. But the challenging of parochial assumptions about human nature is what this piece is all about.)

Anyway, in Murray-Smith’s invented meeting between writer and messenger, the bone of contention is whether Highsmith can be convinced to write one more Ripley novel before she dies. It’s a beautiful example of how clarity of motivation can keep us utterly hooked, while also providing the playwright with the most delicious opportunities for subversion.

The play is set late last century, and part of its fascination is how quickly the assumptions of the literary world Highsmith inhabited have come to seem so distant from those of the present.

In juxtaposition to our contemporary literary focus on bearing witness to what’s been done to us, here are at least three ideas the play provocatively throws forth:

  1. Writers are, or can be, neutral. (Like Switzerland.) Their job is not to tell us what is morally wrong. They simply present the truth of human nature. And they can do so in a way that renders our moral compass irrelevant. (Highsmith, apparently, makes us root for Ripley.)
  2. Writers have the ability to do what they do because of the horrible things that have happened to them. (Francis Bacon supposedly was locked in a cupboard as a child, and that’s why he became a great painter.) Our personal suffering does not position us to bear witness to injustice, but rather to see into the human heart, and to portray powerfully what we find there.
  3. The human heart is dark. Civilization is a veneer and, in truth, we are violent beasts. This idea has long be in stock, but our current focus on sociology rather than psychology has hidden it way at the back of the shelf.  

Just these three ideas should send any audience out into the night burning with questions. (There’s a fourth idea I’d like to talk about, but I’ll get back to it at the end.) It’s a privilege to see such a rich, sophisticated, utterly engaging work.

Captivated by the play, I’ve said nothing about the production. Under Shaun Rennie’s direction, it’s brilliant.

Toni Scanlan as Highsmith is glorious: snappy, curmudgeonly, hilariously acerbic until a certain familiarity about her visitor encourages a pathos-inducing vulnerability.

Laurence Boxhall as Edward is magnificent. Initially playing a terrific comic balance between the awkwardness and confidence of youth, Boxhall gradually, and mesmerizingly, morphs the character into something grippingly different.

It’s a joy to watch two consummate actors do such masterful work.

Now, the end. Don’t worry, there’ll be no spoilers – because I didn’t really understand the end. (Or, at least, it sent me out into the darkness alight with questions.)

But that fourth idea? Teasingly offered for our consideration is the relation between the writer’s created world and their reality. By extension, it’s a tantalising invitation to ask ourselves Does our vision of the world actually create our world?  

Paul Gilchrist

Switzerland by Joanna Murray-Smith

At Ensemble until 8 June

ensemble.com.au

Image by Brett Boardman

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