Theatre: Giving Up the Ghosts and 3 Seeds

Giving Up the Ghosts 
By Sarah Young
Owl Productions
Directed by Joe Lui
Designer Sara Chirichilli
Performed by Georgia King and Paul Grabovac

3 Seeds
By Afeif Ismail
Transcreated by Vivienne Glance and Afeif Ismail
Always Working Artists
Directed by Jeremy Rice
Designed by Cherie Hewson
Performed by Violette Ayad, Michelle Endersbee, Paul Grabovac, Janice Lim, Verity Softly, Kevin Mararo Wangai, Brianna Williams

For most of us, suicide is inexplicable. Perhaps, for our own safety, it needs to be. The great strength of Giving Up the Ghosts, the playwriting debut of Sarah Young, is that she doesn’t try to explain the suicidal impulse, or impose insights upon it. Her play, as deceptively powerful as it is deceptively simple, builds a platform for us to attempt to grasp a meaning, or at least some understanding, from suicide’s opaque horror.

Theatre: Gertrude Stein and a Companion

By Win Wells
Her Infinite Variety Ensemble
Directed by Helen Doig
Performed by Vivienne Glance and Shirley Van Sanden
The Guild Studio
Until December 14

While I first became aware of Alice B. Toklas, in my student days, it was only because her name was part of the title of a minor Peter Sellers movie of the time. It had nothing to do with her, but made for a great round of charades.
Later, you saw grainy images of a mousy little woman standing with another woman and someone really, really famous, like Ernest Hemingway or Pablo Picasso.
The other woman was Gertrude Stein, and they were perhaps the world’s most famous lesbian couple before Ellen and Portia.
I feel I know her much better now, thanks to Win Wells’s deft Gertrude Stein and a Companion, and a terrific performance by Shirley Van Sanden.
There’s nothing mousy about Van Sanden, but she can play it, and that sets up her characterisation on familiar ground. What she does then, to Alice and our impression of her, is outstanding. Van Sanden makes her feisty, sometimes fierce, funny and downright sexy. She plays Alice from the studious young woman who arrives in Paris in 1907 until she dies, impoverished and evicted from her apartment, sixty years later. She has outlived Stein by 21 years.
Vivienne Glance, who plays Stein in life and as an apparition after her death, is a perfect foil for Van Sanden’s Alice. She captures both Stein’s generosity and her haughtiness, her essential American-ness, in a handsome, evenly paced performance.
I must say Wills is the most obscure playwright I’ve ever not come across – even our friends of last resort, Messrs Google and Wikipedia, are almost no help. His dialogue cleverly uses the cadence of Stein’s own writing to great effect, and director Helen Doig’s decision to let his words do the work pays of in a clear, engaging reading of his text.
I got off to bad start with Van Sanden and HIVE, the all-female ensemble, because of their first production, a misguided Titus Andronicus in which I thought she was fatally miscast. Here she is perfectly cast, the show has been judiciously chosen and produced (in the tiny Guild Studio space in East Perth), and absolutely deserves your attention.

This review appeared in The West Australian 5.12.13       

Theatre: The Cat in the Box

by Vivienne Glance

directed by Mark Barford

With James Helm, Summer Williams, Anna Brockway and Kingsley Judd

Blue Room Theatre

31 July – 18 August

James Helm and Summer Williams

Vivienne Glance’s little absurdist thriller The Cat in the Box has its roots very squarely in the 1970s, but that doesn’t make it less entertaining or provocative.

The set-up is familiar territory – four very different people find themselves locked in a room with no way of escape and precious little to survive on. How they survive, and how the political microcosm in the room forms and plays out, is the stuff of the play.

There’s nothing particularly innovative or radical about Glance’s ideas – we’ve seen them before, but they are refreshed by the quality of her writing, which is sharp, funny and rarely portentous.

There’s nothing in The Cat in the Box to change the world, but as an entertainment, and a theatrical undertaking, it has much to recommend it.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian