By Elise
Wilson
Directed by
Marshall Stay
Performed
by Kylie Bywaters, Tamara Creasey, Courtney Henri, Christopher Moro and Jordan
Valentini
Blue Room
Theatre
Until 13
July
Elise Wilson is on some sort of trajectory. The 2018 WAAPA performing
arts graduate dashed downtown from the Mt Lawley campus to the Blue Room where
she’s been making waves as an actor in shows like Hive Mind and Grace (with
much more to come this year). Even some of her purposeful performances as the
theatre’s usher during the fringe stopped the chatter in the Blue Room’s foyer
– now that’s an achievement!
She’s also found time to write, and Floor Thirteen, her first full-length
play, is the result. It’s an auspicious debut.
A young, smart and aspirational lawyer, Phoebe (Kylie Bywater), is
heading home from a party at her client’s apartment to celebrate his win in the
big court case she’d been working on. She’s more than a little drunk, and much
more than a little unsettled, so the last thing she needs is the lift to stick,
somewhere between the fourteenth and twelfth floor.
Help is at hand, and soon a reassuring technician’s voice is keeping her
calm while he sorts out the problem.
But calm isn’t on the agenda for Phoebe’s night, and the reason isn’t
because she’s stuck in a lift. It’s what has happened that night, before she
got in the lift, that has got her seriously unglued, and it’s finding out why
that was – why that really was – that
is Wilson’s story.
Floor Thirteen is about memory, how we build it and how it peels away
like onionskin to expose the truth.
Wilson has worked closely with the producer/director/designer Marshall
Stay and Bywaters, also recent WAAPA grads, and the result – the core of the
production – is tight, clear and tense. Stay’s set, an all-but-transparent box
representing the lift is a perfect performance space for Bywaters, and she
brings Phoebe to nervy, jagged life. Stay’s ever-so-slightly-distorted soundscape
and Scott McArdle’s lighting design amplify the uneasy energy and edginess of
the text, and Bywaters’ performance.
However, there’s more to Floor Thirteen than one actor playing one
stranded woman; as the unstable layers of Phoebe’s memory of events are exposed,
they are performed as tableaux by an ensemble of performers – Tamara Creasey,
Courtney Henri, Christopher Moro and Jordan Valentini – circling the lift. They
silently mouth the conversations Phoebe remembers, or concocts, and give
physical form to the shifting reality of events.
It’s tightly devised (“movement dramaturgy” – a new one for me – by
Jessica Russell) and performed, but I’m not convinced it adds materially to the
text or our understanding of its voice.
I’ve great admiration for the performing arts course at WAAPA, and the
work it does to train students across the range of disciplines involved in
theatre making. Because of the mix of forms and performance it employs, Floor
Thirteen felt like an extension of that work, and that training, rather than a
fully autonomous production. .
Whether that makes for the best use of these talents, or whether it best
serves the text, is an unanswered question.
I left Floor Thirteen feeling I’d like to see it again, but this time
with just the story, the actor and the technician’s disembodied voice, to make
that judgement.