At La Mama until October 1, 2000
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
Flame by Joanna Murray-Smith deals with grief about not only
the death of a loved one but the death of a love.
Max (Alex Pinder) and Louisa (Michele Williams) stand in an
empty space. They speak as if disconnected. She has sold, or rather given away,
their marital bed. he is appalled. Slowly we realise that he is dead, she is
his widow.
He asks over and over, "Do you miss...?" She does
not reply. They interrupt their thoughts, talk at cross-purposes and
misunderstand each other.
We discover that the marriage was "A tight little
life". She says, "Thy loved their life but they had no life."
The dead man's memory of their life is a mirage. he believed it was perfect
while his wife was bored and having an affair with a friend of theirs.
In the end, no relationship is safe from the chaos and
destruction of miscommunication and ennui. Murray-Smith wrote this play is 1994
and it pre-empts the dialogue style of later plays, Redemption and Nightfall.
The characters sentences are broken and their thoughts struggle out of the dark
recesses of their minds.
Joy Mitchell's direction concentrates on the images and
poetic style of Murray-Smith's writing. The actors talk directly to us much of
the time, avoiding eye contact and emphasising the lack of communication
between them. There is no technical embellishment. The lighting is simple and
unchanging.
Pinder gains our sympathy by playing Max as a bright, almost
naive man who still idolises his wife even after death. His voice is light and
almost piping like a child, his demeanour open and imploring.
Williams ,as Louisa, finds a grim and steely edge that
highlights the dissonance between the characters. Her icy, ironic tone previews
the awful truth she reveals later about her betrayal of her husband. Both
actors manage the difficult dialogue and style admirably.
This is a deceptively simple piece which takes a complex
emotional landscape and tackles it in a stylised form. Murray-Smith's writing
is effective and, at times, compelling, particularly in the first half.
By Kate Herbert
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