Goodbye Mrs. Blore , May 4, 2000

by Robert Hewett

HIT Productions at Darebin Arts Centre until May 4, 2000

Whitehorse Centre May 5 & 6 then regional centres until June 2000

Bookings: 9416 8933

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Robert Hewett's play, Goodbye Mrs. Blore, is blessed with two very fine actors: Carole Burns and Ailsa Piper. For a couple of hours these two women chase each other around a doctor's surgery and a park bench.

They bicker, protest and care for each other until life cheats them of their relationship. What draws these two unlikely women together into a friendship which survives 27 years?

Kathleen "Kelly" Blore (Burns) is a nuggetty middle-aged women who arrives at Dr. Julia Lewis's (Piper) surgery looking for a discreet "normal" (ie male) doctor. She wants someone who will not make a fuss about the fact she cannot read or that her dull husband in Hurstbridge is not the father of her twins.

We follow their fraught relationship that is initially based on Kelly's irregular visits, bouts of illness and eventually a chance a jaunt together to a film.

The story travels from their meeting in 1964 to their parting in 1991. Hewett writes an episodic play that leaps sometimes four or more years in their lives. The two are at first insufferable to each other but, finally, indispensable.

It is warm and funny with some very well observed dialogue drawn straight from the suburbs of old Australia. There are, however, moments when it is over-written and becomes sentimental. I do not refer to the loving response of the women to each other's illnesses.

The two actors manage to maintain the truth of the relationship throughout, in spite of the odd purple passage. Burns is an actor with impeccable comic timing and a charm and magnetism that leaves one grinning. Piper is a fine foil as the driven young doctor who is part of the new age of feminist thinking.

Their final scenes together are moving and sweet. It makes one want to go home and hug a friend before they are gone.

Director, Babs McMillan keeps the pace swift and the laughs frequent. The design by Anna French remains the same throughout the 27 years, making the latter years resonate with the past.

This play will appeal to a crowd that does not like its theatre too scruffy, too rude, too grim or too arty. It is a strong, conventional work which will do well in a regional tour.

by Kate Herbert