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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 22. 1973

After the Fall: — Unity Theatre Reviewed by Lawrence McDonald

After the Fall:

Unity Theatre Reviewed by Lawrence McDonald

Ten years after this play's first performance. Unity Theatre belatedly announce its 'New Zealand Premier'. One wonders why they bothered to resurrect this tortuous piece of desiccated realism, the larger part of which is given over to the central character's monologues. Indeed, it could be conjectured that Arthur Millar has simply edited a representative series of episodes from the files of his Psychoanalyst and dressed them up in dramatic form.

The central figure, Quentin, a middle class American intellectual reviews the pattern of his life focusing primarily upon his relationships with women and 'Socialism'. While his relationship with 'Socialism' — of which we learn nothing is not even substantial enough to warrant an appearance before McCarthy's notorious tribunal, his various wives all end up on the analyst's couch. His last wife, Maggie, is apparently based upon Marilyn Monroe (Millar's former wife). So represented here it is difficult to divine what fascination she could have exercised over Kennedy.

Formally, the play is presented by means of Quentin's monologues to the audience. The order of his dialogue with the other characters is dictated by the order in which they appear in his freely associating mind. However this is all realised in a fundamentally realistic, linear framework which merely juxtaposes episodes, never allowing any development of them.

Instead of providing the audience with multiple perspectives in which to assess Quentin's life, we are offered mannered soliloquies in which the banal predominates over the illuminating. Finally we are left with a static set of mimetic frames in which Quentin is gradually drowned in his own verbal diarrhoea. Consequently his forced expression of optimism at the end is a weak and ad hoc conclusion.

I left the theatre feeling that I had witnessed the product of a diseased and decadent culture — a meditation on its own vacuity.