Thursday, 19 February 2009UWA was abuzz with activity this evening, filled not with students ardent to earn their degrees, but with the general public, effervescent with choice for the large array of offerings from the Perth International Arts festival.
Walking past audiences heading towards the Sommerville Auditorium and the Octogon Theatre, I thought again what a beautiful evening it was, warm and calm, with just enough humidity to make it comfortable to leave your jacket at home.
I was visiting the campus to see Joan Didion's Pulitzer prize winning memoir brought to life at the Dolphin Theatre; and what was originally staged as a one woman tour de force in New York is now experimentally being brought to a Perth audience with two people on the stage.
A few weeks ago the Black Swan State Theatre and PIAF had invited their subscribers to an 'artists meet the audience' talk about how their production was progressing, and I had been intrigued by director Kate Cherry's concept of having not just the character of Joan Didion on stage, but of utilizing cellist and composer Iain Grandage to provide an internal soundtrack of sorts for Didion's monologue.
At the session the music Grandage previewed was dreamy, at times passive and then fervent and I thought how wonderful it would be coupled with this monologue detailing a woman's journey to understand how life could have taken away two of the things she most held dear.
But at that session Helen Morse did not speak overmuch, preferring to defer to her director for most of the questions.
At the performance last night she was incandescent, her grey-white hair haloed around her face, her bird-like features almost pushing into skeletal, and her eyes at turns defiant and despairing.
There was a slight jar when she first began to speak, for of course Didion is American and that accent in Australia will always stand out, but within minutes our ears warmed to the familiar cadences and the conversational tone of the piece made you feel as if you were right there with her in the hospital room, at her home in Malibu, in Paris with her husband, and at her side at his funeral.
The stage revealed two islands of white sand built up and surrounded by clear water. It was mostly still, but the subtle lighting design by Matt Scott would at times play up the ripples across the surface which was then reflected onto the back of the stage wall.
To be honest, I have to say that I found the soundscape improvised by Grandage rather distracting; while at times the words and the music seemed to work synergistically, overall I felt that Morse as an actress was much more compelling with just her face, her voice and Didion's powerful quixotic dialogue. I also felt that the sense of loneliness that Didion was attempting to control but at the same time impart upon her audience was belied by the fact that there was another person on stage.
Overall, well worth seeing for Helen Morse's rich and transformative performance and the evocative memory stagescape.
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