The Blue Hour, March 23, 1996

 By  IRAA Theatre (Renato Cuocolo)
7 Lowther St Alphington 
March to until April, 1996

Generally, one advantage of being a theatre director is that you do not have to be on stage every night. In The Blue Hour by IRAA Theatre, director Renato Cuocolo is on for the duration.

This show, which is the Part One of his first Melbourne production, Far From Where in 1988, is based on his own recollections, images and photos of his family in Italy. It is about memory and attachment. "Is memory something we have or something we have not?" It begins at 8.20 pm, twilight which is close to the peculiar mood of memory.

 Cuocolo controls his past by snapping his fingers, calling up his father, aunt and uncles and Nonna and using them almost as puppets in his mind's eye. We watch them relive episodes in their lives before he was born. We see their grievances, jealousies, resentments and joys and it all ends with a family Last Supper.

There is text taken from Joyce, Kis, Kantor and a chunk of Chekhov towards the end. The style is a homage to Tadeusz Kantor, the Polish director who died in 1990. The action is repetitive, stylised and rich with both humour and anguish. The appearance of the family is repeated in the blue light of the sliding upstage doorway.

They leap or stroll, glide or rush into Cuocolo's present to begin anew each scene. They fall, he moves them about, they try to decide where they belong, where they were all situated. Memory is a fickle lover.

The design (Jorge Merjer) is simply chairs, table, and bed: domestic images of childhood memory. Costumes (Kate Pitman) owe a great deal to Kantor's originals.

There are repetitive actions which typify each character: the moving and stilted march of Georgio Cuocolo (David Pledger), the wafting hands of Melita Jurasic as mother Maria, the hysterical photography of the inimitable Catherine Simmonds as Aunt Stefania. The ensemble is excellent and the whole piece is poignant and crisply directed.

KATE HERBERT