Black
Swan State Theatre Company
Directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler
Directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler
Set
and costume designer Alicia Clements
Lighting
designer Lucy Birkinshaw
Vision
designer Mia Holton
Composer and sound designer Ash Gibson Greig
Composer and sound designer Ash Gibson Greig
Performed
by Rebecca Davis, Stuart Halusz, Kingsley Judd, Tariri Mavondo, Jo Morris, Tom
Stokes and Alison van Reeken
Heath
Ledger Theatre until November 4
 |
| Jo Morris, Stuart Halusz and Rebecca Davis |
There’s A Hit –
A Palpable Hit – In The Next Room
It’s an entertaining (if likely apocryphal) historical
factoid that the first appliance of the age of electricity was the venerable
and handy vibrator; it was certainly in wide use in doctors’ rooms as a
copacetic for female hysteria – in other words, to cure that which ails you by
the bringing on of orgasm – quite soon after those ACs and DCs started running
through Edison’s wires.
The American playwright Sarah Ruhl has bounced off all this
with In the Next Room, a witty, playful peek into domesticity and its pitfalls,
the role of women in marriage and society, and quite a bit more besides.
Along the way she neatly avoids all of the traps of
prurience and earnestness lying in wait for her, and the result is a wildly
entertaining and intelligent piece of popular theatre.
It would be anyway, just on the strength of the text, but
this production is lifted to its very considerable heights by the skill and
talent of its creative team and cast.
Jeffrey Jay Fowler, the director, has accurately assessed
Ruhl’s play for what it is; a modern take on Restoration Comedy, almost a
bedroom – well consulting room – farce, and he plays it elegantly through the
covers. He’s much assisted by his designer Alicia Clements, whose cutaway
two-way-mirror set is wholly successful – quite inspired in fact –and allows
the action to move from room to room seamlessly and often hilariously. Her
costumes, which are removed, replaced and got inside with great regularity, are
authentic and sumptuous.
Ash Gibson Greig has composed music that perfectly fits both
the play’s acoustic era and electrical subject, and Lucy Birkinshaw’s lighting
is subtly effective throughout, even when dealing with the tricky task of
switching set lighting on and off like an electric lamp.
A cast this well provisioned, led, dressed and lit has a
great opportunity, and they go to town on it. There are terrific supporting
turns by Tom Stokes as the ardent but diffidently amorous artist Leo Irving
(who gets a different, and squirm-in-the-seat, kind of vibration), Tariro
Mavondo as the African-American wet nurse Elizabeth who introduces a suite of
issues as relevant today as they were in postbellum America, and Kingsley Judd
as the straight-laced but sympathetic husband of one of the patients of the New
Machine.
Alison van Reeken, who stepped into the cast at late notice
(as she is often asked to do), is glorious (as she always is) as Annie, a Ma
Clampett nurse who gets swept up in all this tomfoolery.
The story revolves around the practice of the good doctor
Givings, and Stuart Halusz gives a perfectly pitched performance as the medical
technocrat oblivious to the torrents and torments of those around him. He’s in
pretty good shape, too.
The play belongs to its leading women, and Rebecca Davis, as
Catherine Givings, and Jo Morris as her husband’s patient Sabrina Daldry, both
give career performances.
Morris is electric (sorry) as Sabrina, and she makes her
I’ll-have-what-she’s-having scenes – she develops quite a hankering for her
little buzzing friend – a tour-de-force.
Davis rarely gets the opportunity to show her range, but she
does here, and her ability to slip easily from farce to genuine emotion is the
touchstone for the production’s stance, and its success.
There’s much talk around about the sparse opportunities for
seasoned professional actors in the current Perth theatre. There are reasons
for it, and I don’t intend to argue the whys and wherefores in a review of one
show.
This one, though, reminds us that the talent is here, and in
spades. You can help by the easy act of seeing it when you get a chance as
enjoyable as this is.
