Script review
No Strings Attached by Hilary Beaton
Playlab Press Brisbane 1994
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
Hilary Beaton is well-known for her scripts for young
people's theatre in both New Zealand and Australia.
No Strings Attached reverberates with 80's community
and youth productions which had an almost formulaic structure. Take an issue,
simplify it, draw an analogy, limit characters for small company budgets, make
it physical.
The play is neither clearly character-driven nor
plot-driven. Being based in the imagery of skydiving, it is inevitably very
physical. The text relies heavily on the direction and performances for its
ultimate success or failure on stage. Its style moves between the naturalistic
and the dream state of Clare's memory or reverie, between past adn present.
This is not a literary script but rather a vehicle for physicality on stage
which makes it is nigh impossible to assess on paper.
Clare, Maxine and
Joycie, members of a champion sky-diving team in their youth, reunite to train
for a spectacular one-off dive to celebrate the marriage of Desiree, their
fourth team-member. The three meet at intervals for the weeks before the
wedding, deciding on moves, costumes, publicity, sponsorship, discuss old
times, old jumps. They haggle and bicker, returning to much worn behaviour
patterns as soon as they meet. Essentially, nobody has changed.
Beaton draws parrallels between the evolution of the women's
movement and team free-falling. Some comparisons effectively elaborate on
issues, but many connections are tenuous, brittle or thin. As a result of
feminism and its demands on the New Woman, women in the 60's and 70's had to
throw themselves headlong into their new roles, taking enormous risks with work
and personal lives.
This is Beaton's
initial parallel. Women were forced, during "those heady days of
sisterhood", into what could now be seen to be artificial bonding. They
were expected to be a community, to band together and support each other
despite radical differences in interests, temperament, education and social
status. Here we encounter Beaton's second parallel. These three vastly
differing women came together to dive, stayed to be the first team of women to
win a National Championship then fell apart when one member abandoned them to
go in search of herself in India.
The play deals with middle-class feminism which is a
composite of corporate and alternative culture. The diving metaphor applies to
risk- taking, to trying new challenges. Here lies the third parallel. These
women dived into difficult terrain in the 70's. Clare leapt into writing
self-help books, made enormous amounts of cash and became "supermarket
famous". She is not, however, in control of her emotional life. The
hard-nosed Joycie, gabbles about money and sex in the same breath, started her
own sporting wear design label but has no personal life. These two are examples
of the women who concentrated on work and abandoned the personal working
through sisterhood but never grappled effectively with relationships with men.
It becomes clear that they did not succeed with women either. The play almost
celebrates bad behaviour and proves that feminism did not necessarily produce
women who were more mature. These women
have not even overcome the childish and sometimes offensive "tampon
joke" style of women's comedy in the 80's. The team stil calls itself
"The Carefrees".
The three seem to have maintained the more unpleasant
characteristics of the 70's movement. Joycie is ambitious, ruthless, selfish,
devious, untrustworthy, demanding, loud and funny, volatile and temperamental.
Her generally unexpurgated language is sometimes automatic, at others it is a
childish ploy to shock. She is brassy, defensive, outwardly independent but
innately needy and dependent on others' advice and care. She is unable to form lasting relationships,
is sexually dysfunctional or confused; her grief at the loss of the friendship
when Max became a lesbian could herald a latent homosexuality or it may simply
indicate neediness.
Maxine is simple, dogged, organised to a fault, reliable,
annoying in her need for routine, unadventurous except in her diving,
conservative even in her lesbianism and suburban in her lifestyle described by
Joycie as being like "cows with full udders". She could be a leader,
a motivator if she were not so tactless, unadventurous, persistent, demanding
and over-sensitive.
Clare is the central character. She has achieved in business
the success she could not achieve in diving. She is superior, articulate, cool
and business-like, reserved with her emotions, versed in the New Age language
of communication about which she writes in her self-help manual. Ironically,
writing in her ivory tower has left her
ill-equipped to deal with her irrational
and demanding friends and unable to cope with the real world. She is
personally powerful but not a risk -taker which belies her role as advisor to
the cowardly.
The structure of the play and its reliance on flashbacks to
demonstrate the original relationships between the three, leaves them unsatisfyingly
shallow and two-dimensional. Each character seems to have a very limited
repertoire of personal traits and dialogue. They never develop. No depth is
revealed, no layers peeled away. There is a repetitive quality to their
interactions. They seem to say the same things over and over. Nobody breaks
role. Nobody is changed. What they were in the 70's they remain.
Their common past is revealed in a slow drip of information.
Beaton weaves details of their present lives into the narrative at each of
their intermittent meetings. These women are unscrupulous and, without the
charm of villainy, they become eminently dislikeable. Joycie, seeking
international recognition for her women's sporting outfit designs, visits New
York to meet a major designer.
In a too-lengthy monologue, Joyce tells a barely credible
tale of woe about how she made a fatal error in using Carl Wasserstein's name
to wriggle out of a shop-lifting charge. He calls her "full of shit!"
and all her dreams of international success are shattered. It seemed
well-deserved. Maxine lobbies and manipulates Clare for $10,000 ostensibly for
sponsorship but actually to rescue her poverty-stricken relationship. Clare,
famous for diving analogies in titles: Pull the Ripcord on Anger and Canopy of
Love, is now writing a book exploiting their reunion and her return to
sky-diving.
The dialogue seems to undercut any serious intention of this
play. It is oddly placed and uncomfortable as if it had been constructed then
slotted into scenes. When covering character names on the left of the page I
expect to differentiate voices. These become a single voice, often glib and
predictable, riddled with platitudes. It smacks of arch, smart-arse women.
Joycie Is it lonely at
the top?
Clare I've become
bitter and twisted - a bit like expensive marmalade.
Joycie C.mon. You're
holding out on me. Are you bonking?
Clare Just the same!
Joycie Are you in
love?
Clare Not so much in
love as in limbo.
Joycie I'm like that.
I have to keeep a man in my head so I remember to change my underwear. No-one special?
Clare I am a happily
unmarried woman.
Joycie Moi aussi.
Remember when sex was safe and sky diving was dangerous? These days, sky diving
is very very safe.ˇ
Clare owed her life to Desiree who saved her when she
knocked herself unconscious on a jump. This accident was the downfall of the
group the team the friendships. It is a parallel to the kind of crisis which
tears people apart socially. One sleeps with another's lover, one borrows
money, betrays a secret or trust. The relationships never recover. Clare
remembered only the positive when she decided to bring the team together for
the wedding. She wanted a ritual ending a re-joining, "a linked exit".
Here is the final parallel
between diving and the intense and fraught relationships of these three
women. There is much more to be
confronted about the condition of the post-feminist women nearing middle-age.
The complexity of their predicament is dealt with superficially and the diving
metaphor becomes laboured and obscured.
Although the first act of the play had a run in first in
Auckland in September 1988, the play, directed by Sue Rider, premiered at La
Boite in Brisbane on September 8, 1994. Rider describes a lengthy collaborative
process with the writer which included script development workshops with
several Brisbane companies: Playworks, National Playwrights' Centre, Playlab,
Brisbane Theatre Company. Grants from the Literature Board of the Australia
Council and New Zealand Literary Fund also fed the re-drafting process. This
was not a play written in isolation. Its evolution echoes the teamwork involved
in its topic: the art of formation skydiving.
These women have abandoned all relationship to the
community, sharing ethic of early third wave feminism and have degenerated into
the "me" ethic of the 80's and 90's.
They exploit their friends, betray their lovers, demand financial and
emotional support rather than earn it. They are a singularly dislikeable group
of ego-centric users who represent few positive feminist values. Maxine was the
only one who stayed with diving, its associated teamwork and analogous feminism.
Max chose to dive into sisterhood, demanded high standards of her teammates and
stayed to run the organisation and be the champion of feminism. She stuck with
women and became a lesbian. Her lover, Chris, is named but remains archly
ungendered for most of the play.
KATE HERBERT
Playwright, director, theatre critic, lecturer in Drama at
Northern Melbourne College of TAFE.
1975 words
