Lavender Bags by Jack Hibberd, July 5, 2000

Lavender Bags by Jack Hibberd

At Chapel off Chapel until July 30, 2000

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Playwright, Jack Hibberd, is a master of language. Actor, Evelyn Krape, is a human dynamo. Their collaboration in Lavender Bags is a splendid and chaotic confectionary.

Hibberd's script is a delicious collision of the suburban, the lyrical and the vulgar. He marries literary allusions with local references, artistic concepts with banal Australianisms to create hilarious and resonant phrases such as "a surrealist from Sassaffras."

The play is a one hour monodrama, performed by Krape, about Desdemona Jones, a woman well past her prime who is late for her wedding to her Othello; "My Romeo from Omeo," as she describes him.

The play teeters between tragedy and hilarity, Hibberd's trademark. Desdemona prepares for her doomed marriage. She arrives on stage, bursting naked through mirrored doors wearing only a tiny towel over her shoulders and a floral shower cap on her matted Medusa locks. "Delectable?", she pleads.

Krape is exceptional in this role and it appears that she and Hibberd, who directed her, have had a barrel of laughs creating this grotesque and poignant little clown, Desdemona. Krape's performance is abandoned, skilful and wildly funny .

She is vulnerable and crude, sucking on a glue bottle filled with pink gin. " I'm blotto Otto," she quips.

Hibberd's dialogue is a tap turned on full, running like a stream-of-consciousness with wordplays and word associations.

Des dresses progressively in white: French knickers, strapless bra, chemise, gown and veil. She gambols and cavorts in crazy choreography "by Martha Graham Murphy", raving about age, beauty, fashion, love, sex and her parents' creaky marriage.

Mother is an irritating hypochondriac lying abed upstairs. Dad is in an urn in Desdemona's glory box.  Des's own wedding preparations are a bevy of premonitions about the horror and depression that are to be her life.

In order to hide those lavender bags under the eyes, she slathers moisturiser, foundation, even spak-filla onto her face. The lippy makes a drunken clown's mouth, the eye-liner lifts her brows in a perpetual look of astonishment at her life.

Lavender Bags is part of Hibberd's 30-play cycle. We have seen Krape in several including another monodrama, Long Time No See, and in Legacy, about a family wake, both in 1997.

"Life is unreal - unlike the theatre," says Desdemona. We can only agree.

By Kate Herbert