Single Ladies Now, re-posting review from 16 Oct 2020 ***

 

Red Stitch, online 16 Oct 2020 ***

By Michele Lee 3 x 10 minute monologues

Red Stitch Theatre online

https://redstitchweb.squarespace.com/single-ladies-audio-page

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Stars:***

I am re-posting this review (16 Oct 2020) of the ONLINE abridged version of Single Ladies, now that the live show is on stage at Red Stitch. This review published only on this Blog. KH

Andrea Swifte, Jem Lai, Caroline Lee

The audio play is making a comeback since Covid closed down our theatres, and Red Stitch is on the audio bandwagon with three short, audio monologues based on Michele Lee’s Single Ladies, a play that was cancelled back in March.

 

Directed by Bagryana Popov, these three monologues by three women take place in Collingwood, an inner suburb of Melbourne with a colourful history and even more colourful current population.

 

Rachel (performed by Jem Lai) dubs herself ‘a sad insomniac‘. She lies in bed, listening to the last tram on Smith Street, checking her phone feeds, yawning, watching lesbian trash on Netflix and reminiscing about Em, her recent ex-girlfriend. For an entire night, punctuated by passing trams and noisy, drunk pedestrians, Rachel analyses the relationship and her own inability to let go and clear her house.

Lilike, A batty local woman from an immigrant past, is performed with a broad Aussie accent and vibrating, nervous energy by the inimitable Carolyn Lee. Every morning, she attends her ‘Collingwood friendship shrine’ where she chats to an odd collection of objects – a ceramic toad for one – that she has placed at her shrine.

 

Lee’s Lilike is already a strident objector to a car park being built by a construction company, and she now discovers that her own home is also to be developed for modern housing.

 

Andrea Swifte plays Anne, a middle-aged woman, who lives alone in a Collingwood apartment and is clearly lonely. She eats soup, makes calls, almost break into tears, then chastises herself. She phones various men who seem to be her previous dates, until one, Daniel, a farmer, is available to chat – about soup.

 

The character of Anne is enlivened by Swifte’s easy, relaxed, engaging and vocally strong performance. The context of the narrative is clearer in this monologue than in the other two but this may be because of the shift from stage to audio play.

 

These monologues will pass the time as you walk with your phone or lie in your bed musing about this mad, new world we are confronting.

 

By Kate Herbert