Panayiota & Locked In, June 17, 1997

Panayiota by Angela Costi & Locked In by Tricia Bowen

By Knock Knock Theatre

Brunswick Mechanics Institute until June 29, 1997

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around 16 June, 1997

Two writers, Angela Costi and Tricia Bowen, decided to mount their own plays at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute rather than wait for someone else to do it for them. More power to them.

The two plays, Panayiota and Locked In, are unrelated except by theme.

Angela Costi's Panayiota is the second in the program and by far the more successful. Lisa, previously known as Athena, is at a watershed in her 27-year life. For ten years she has denied her Greek-Cypriot heritage, her parents' wishes, her school friends and has followed he dream to be Anglo-Australianised, to live with a dinky-di Aussie and to be an artist.

The play has a complex structure that works mostly in its favour. It shifts between "Lisa's" present and her past, layering her developing relationship difficulties with her abandonment of her school friends.

As she struggles with Pat's (Caleb Cluff) need for a more predictable and conservative life she surprisingly reunites with her two pals. Stella (Bridget Haylock) has the model Greek marriage and baby Panayiota, (the Virgin Mary) while Silvana (Daniela Farinacci)  is still unfulfilled  in her role as tart craving love.

Director Kim Baston has created some lyrical moments and slow-motion dream-like sequences set against the well-observed ordinariness of the women's dialogue. Back projections of seashore echo Lisa's drawings, dreams, memories and fears of water that reverberate with Jungian images of an emotional sea.

The actors are more comfortable and challenged in Panayiota.  In Locked In, they are confined by a rigid, simplistic structure and narrative. It is a play more for voices than action, better suited to radio.

Three women sit 'locked in’ their homes. One is young, insecure with romantic visions of her ideal man coming to rescue her. A second is a stitched-up mother obsessed with locks and air freshener. The third is a working class divorcee who mistrusts neighbours.  They are all three stereotypes.

A man knocks at their respective doors. He has forgotten where he lives. Locked In is a play about how suburbia subsumes people's identities. It smacks of 70's Agit-Prop theatre when it was novel and in vogue to comment on the facelessness of the great suburban sprawl.

Any such social observations needs, in the late nineties, to take further the argument or imagery. There is nothing substantial or new being said in this text no in the style of its production that is rather unimaginatively realised.

Locked In feels like a play from the 70's when it was new and hence in vogue to comment on the facelessness of the great suburban sprawl. Any such social observations need in the late nineties, to take the argument or the imagery further. There is nothing substantial or new being said in this text or in the style of its production that is rather unimaginatively realised.

KATE HERBERT