Reviews 2006
Reviews 2006
✭✭✭✭✭
by Robert Hewett, directed by Geordie Johnson
Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford
June 30-September 24, 2006
"First Aussie Play at Stratford is a Winner"
Stratford has a hit on its hands with “The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead”. The title rather misleadingly suggests that the show is some sort of farce set in a hair salon. In fact, though there are bursts of humour, the play is predominantly serious. Australian playwright Robert Hewett takes what seems at first to be a routine story about adultery and twists it into something rich and strange. The story itself is fascinating but combined with a tour de force performance from Stratford regular Lucy Peacock, this play is not to be missed.
The play premiered in Sydney and received such acclaim that it toured the country and has already received productions in Europe. The work has a very strict structure--each of the two acts consists of four monologues directed to the audience as if the characters were trying to explain their actions. Rhonda Russell, a suburban housewife and the redhead of the title, has the first and last monologues. In her first monologue we hear how Graham, her husband of seventeen years, phones one day to say he has left her. The “brunette” Lynette, Rhonda’s neighbour, says she has seen Graham with the other woman, “the blonde”, and urges Rhonda to confront her. When they arrive at the mall where the other woman works, Lynette points her out. The confrontation turns violent, Rhonda is arrested and the other woman is taken to hospital.
Up to this point Hewett’s play seems like a rather common, sordid episode of a soap opera. Instead, we soon realize that he has used this event merely as a starting point to explore far deeper issues. Between Rhonda’s first and last monologues we hear her story told from the points of view of six other characters. There is the lesbian doctor Alex, who treats Rhonda’s husband for depression and whose partner Christine is injured. Next is Lynette, who denies any responsibility for what happened. Then, unexpectedly, is Michael, a four-and-a-half-year-old boy who tells us about his pet lizard, his sister Ellen, the old woman Mrs. Carlyle they sometimes have to stay with and the party Alex and his father are going to have for his mother.
If Act 1 moves in an unusual direction, Act 2 is even stranger. We meet Graham, drunk as skunk in the men’s washroom, whose ramblings now that Rhonda is in prison place an entirely different complexion on the events that seemed so clear in Act 1. Then we meet the aged Mrs. Carlyle about seven years after the events in Act 1 who tells us her opinions of what happened and how Ellen and Michael have turned out. The next character is the Russian store-owner Tanya (the real blonde?), whose description of events casts even more doubt on our initial impressions. Rhonda’s final monologue presents her view of what she has learned about herself and other people while in prison.
Beside the themes of fidelity and betrayal, wounding and healing that we might expect from the subject matter, Hewett, who frames his tale a kind of mystery, explores the bigger mystery of chance and necessity and how we accommodate ourselves to them. The question is naturally linked to an examination of the nature of innocence, guilt, punishment and forgiveness. Much in the manner of Ray Lawrence’s fine Australia film “Lantana” (2001), Hewett shows that no simple incident is all that simple and that the mundane can reveal universal mysteries. Hewett has decided that he will alter the script to suit the location where the play is mounted. Given that so much of the action takes place in suburbs or in a mall, now found all over the world, his update for Canada involved, he says in his note, involved few changes and the mention of Tim Horton’s.
We owe a debt of thanks to director Geordie Johnson, who saw the play in Melbourne in 2005, for recognizing its worth and bringing it to North America. His production at the McManus Studio in London, Ontario, that year was the work’s North American premiere. The Stratford production is a more elaborate remount of that production.
Johnson also recognized that the play would be the perfect vehicle for Lucy Peacock. Again he was absolutely right. Peacock lately has given the appearance of suffocating under the weight of playing an immovable mountain of classical roles. This play shows her as you’ve never seen her before, as if she were exhilarated with breathing in fresh air. The seven characters she plays are so sharply differentiated that in the case of Graham and Mrs. Carlyle you can hardly believe it is Peacock who is playing them. The Rhonda we first meet is meek and quiet, stunned by losing her husband and by her incomprehensible actions. The Rhonda we meet at the end is also meek and quiet but now transformed by the knowledge time and reflection have given her. As Lynette and Graham, Peacock delightfully revels in the female and male versions of vulgarity. Both characters are obnoxious, completely self-concerned and irresponsible. Graham is a male chauvinist jerk of the first order, but his obviousness contrasts with Lynette’s mask of care and “education”. Peacock presents Alex as aloof because her intellectual and emotional sides are in constant battle. Peacock also is expert in playing the characters at either extreme of age--Matthew, a normal, loveable little boy who shows he is unconsciously disturbed by events he doesn’t quite understand, and Mrs. Carlyle, who understands far too well what has happened even though she is now almost totally isolated.
Under Johnson’s crisp, elegant direction, Peacock brings a sense of compassion to even the most despicable of this wide spectrum of characters. In a very neat ploy, Johnson has each character leave behind on stage a prop used during each monologue, that remain there till the end like pieces of a puzzle that we have to complete.
Michael Gianfrancesco’s design is beautifully simple. His costumes instantly capture the essence of each character even though, despite the title, we come to learn that appearances are deceptive. The best feature of his design is a large Plexiglas panel at the back of the stage. On the top half of it Craig Macnaughton’s wonderfully conceived video montages are projected, recalling images from the previous monologue and setting the scene for the next. Meanwhile, the bottom half is a backlit muslin screen that shows us Peacock in silhouette physically change from character to character which simply and aptly heightens the theatricality of the production. In that, too, Kimberley Purtell’s sensitive lighting and Stephen Woodjetts’s eerie score play an integral role.
Produced by The Blonde Project, this is the kind of show that is so stimulating one hopes that after its short run at Stratford it will tour to reach the widest possible audience. Kudos then to Geordie Johnson for bringing such a clear vision to this exciting play, to Lucy Peacock for giving one of her best-ever performances and to the Stratford Festival for programming its first-ever play from Down Under.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Lucy Peacock. ©David Hou.
2006-08-25
The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead