Theatre: Eve

The Nest Ensemble

Devised by Margi Brown Ash, Leah Mercer and Daniel Evans

Written and performed by Margi Brown Ash, with Phil Miolin and Roland Adeney

Directed by Leah Mercer
Until November 10

Margi Brown Ash (pic Leigh Brennan)

The starting point for Margi Brown Ash’s tour de force of stage writing and performance is the sad story of Eve Langley, a little-known and largely forgotten novelist and poet who worked from the 1930s until her lonely death in a little shack outside Katoomba, NSW, in 1974.

This is no mere biographical drama, though. Ash combines some of Langley’s writing with those of her self-appointed literary Siamese twins, Flaubert, Dickinson, Keats, Shakespeare and, especially, her beloved Oscar Wilde, in a poetic, combustible interior monologue of reminiscence, longing and heartache. Her own writing fits seamlessly into that high company. It’s thrilling, gorgeously imaginative and physically potent.

I recall, years ago, jumping straight to my feet to applaud Peter Carroll and Ron Blair’s The Christian Brother. I did it again, for many of the same reasons, for Margi Brown Ash and Eve.
Link here to the complete review in The West Australian