THEATRE
Written by Grazia Marin
At Chapel off Chapel until Sat 21 March at 2pm & 7.30pm
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
Stars: **1/2 (2.5)
This review is published only on this blog. I’ll present a radio review on Arts Weekly on 3MBS on Sat 21 March, 2026. KH
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| L-R: Piera Dennerstein, Janet Watson Kruse-Image by Bernard Peasley |
The premise and intention of Grazia Marin’s play, Little Absences, has great potential for a short play with a small cast, and some elements of this first season are successful. In an ageing population, many of us are faced with the declining health of parents and grandparents. It is a confronting and challenging experience.
Chris (Janet Watson Kruse) is an older woman suffering escalating dementia, but fiercely denying the increasing problems she has coping with living independently and alone. She struggles with basic tasks such as feeding and washing herself, keeping her house clean and the fridge stocked. However, she does manage to keep a secret stash of alcohol that she hides from her attentive, worried daughter, Jenny (Piera Dennerstein).
Chris has another precious secret that she keeps hidden even from her daughter: as a young woman she had some success as an emerging writer, particularly of poetry. In her demented state, she craves the creativity of the written word but wrestles with memory, language and the capacity to frame and retain an idea. It is heart-breaking to watch her struggling to retrieve that creative state – perhaps almost as distressing as watching her struggle with her alcohol abuse and inability to do the most basic activities.
Kruse is committed and immersed in this fraught but determined character, capturing her frustration and intermittent confusion. Dennerstein embodies the despair and concern of the daughter who respects her mother‘s wishes to be left alone but knows that her intervention is inevitable. An unexpected visitor, Alex (Veronicka Devlin), a young writer who crashed her motorbike nearby, provides some perspective and triggers Chris’s memories of her own writing.
This production, directed by Elnaz Sheshgelani, runs two hours with interval, but needs some vigorous and astute editing to reduce it to perhaps 70 minutes. The dialogue is unnecessarily repetitive, there are some logical inconsistencies, and the structure needs some reshaping.
The play lacks dramatic conflict and has limited dramatic tension and dramatic action. Most of the action is described rather than being “Now“ action. It needs more compelling revelations and stronger turning points in the narrative. All these issues make the play more like an extended monologue interspersed with some character interactions.
The daughter and the visitor’s roles could serve the action better, but perhaps more interesting would be having an actor to play various roles from Chris‘s past: her husband Frank and Eduardo, the exotic lover from her youthful sojourn as a writer in Spain. This actor could also play the visitor.
It is clear that Chris didn’t like her husband Frank, so it is surprising that she chooses to use him as her invisible confidant. It might be more interesting to see her savaging him in her memory with a real actor playing the character.
A flashback to the sensuality of her youth with Eduardo might add an interesting scene. The memories and dreams are captured only by a few slides, scenes of locations and characters and this could provide a visual background to other scenes, rather than being a distraction or interruption.
The fact that Chris was a successful writer when she was young, is insufficient. Perhaps there could be clear revelations about Frank’s extramarital affair and dysfunctional marriage.
Here’s another idea: Jenny’s song, based on Chris’s poem, Little Absences, could begin the play and punctuate it until we become aware, at the end, that it is a eulogy. This might give the piece a dramatic shape and a clear structure. The daughter could then become a kind of narrator, thus avoiding Chris having to constantly explain to us what she’s experiencing as a dementing, but determinedly independent woman.
However, much of the latter part of my review is dramaturgy, and my role here is to be reviewer and critic. There’s certainly potential in Little Absences but, at this stage, neither the script nor the production have fulfilled that potential.
By Kate Herbert
Cast
Chris - Janet Watson Kruse
Alex - Veronicka Devlin
Jenny - Piera Dennerstein
Creative Team
Writer - Grazia Marin
Director - Elnaz Sheshgelani
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