Paradise
By Tes Lyssiotis at La Mama April
18 to until 5 May, 2002
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
The lives of ordinary people are not
always represented in theatre unless in community projects. Tes Lyssiotis, in
her new play, Paradise, puts a magnifying glass on a family living on a remote
farm in Australia.
Green Room
award winning director, Laurence Strangio, creates an atmospheric production
that highlights effectively the strangeness of the harsh, arid land of
drought-ridden Australia and the despair and confusion of the displaced
immigrant.
Lyssiotis's
script deals with Irini,a Greek migrant who married an Australian farmer,
Robert Harris to live in a region that is ironically called Paradise. Her
relationship to both her daughter, Zoe, her husband and to her dusty adopted
land is fraught.
The play is
not a linear narrative. We see, simultaneously, the older Irini Carmelina Di
Guglielmo) with her older daughter (Katerina Kotsonis) overlapping in scenes
with the younger Irini (Maria Theodorakis ) and Zoe. (Loukia Vassiliades)
The
relationship between mother and daughter is the focus of the story. We are
confronted with a series of questions.
Why are
they estranged? Why have they come to Harris's grave together? Why did they
both leave Paradise? How did father and Irini's son die? Why are Irini's
letters from Greece so precious?
The young
Irini never attached to the farm and was often irresponsible. She was obsessed
with glamour and Hollywood movies. "Marry the right man at the right
time", she says to Zoe. "A man with soft hands."
In the play, the past and present are
intercut while the older and younger characters echo each other's movements and
dialogue. Strangio finds ways to stage these shifts and resonances with great
style.
The play
itself has an awkward rhythm intially and is perhaps a little cryptic in parts.
However, it is an effective exposition of Irini and Zoe's lives and
relationship.
Meg White's
set design is deceptively simple. It incorporates the rust red of the desert in
the floor with bolts of beige fabric used to delineate the space and upon which
to project slides. An evocative sound design( Roger Alsop) and subtle
lighting ( Bronwyn Pringle) complete the production.
By Kate
Herbert
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