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.

Uncle Vanya:

by Chekhov, at Downstage. Reviewed by Cathy Wylie.

Chekhoy's impressionistic, delicate characterisation and slow development of plot is an unusual choice for Downstage, which tends to prefer strong, pouncing writers. It's understand able that the cast seemed uneasy with the first scenes, tending to parody and play for the laughs they're accustomed to receiving. Gradually, however, the actors became absorbed in the pitiful collection of unrealised, self absorbent lives, to give some superb performances. David Tinkham as Vanya at lust overblown and self-conscious, suddenly improved after the interval. The histrionics became natural and fitting in the portrayal of a middle-aged man overcome by the discovery of a self denied for many years in the service of a man he now despises and envies for his wife. Janice Finn complements Tinkham's performance with her characterisation of Sonya, equally put upon and equally aware that love, and through it life, eludes her. Chekhoy rightly refuses to celebrate their self efacement and devotion to others who are hardly devoted to them; such indirect living is for him a tragedy, a negation of humanity. David Tinkham and Janice Finn give compelling, anguished performances. It's a pleasure to discover how good an actress Janice Finn can be, in a part that exerts rather than the smart, saucy roles that are usually her lot.

The other characters arc more cut-and-dried, certainly deliberately unsympathetic, even at times a little caricaturish - particularly the domineering 'professor', the old nurse, and the distant mother immersed in her feminist tracts. Grant Tilly is magnificent as the doctor caught up in provincialism, teetering on the edge of an abyss of fear, lost hope and sterility, talking of destruction of environment and humanity in terms that present day activists would applaud. At the same time he is ignorant of the quietly desperate plea of real people close to him. Vanya and the unbeautiful Sonya. I'm beginning to think that Grant Tilly is not only the most versatile actor in the country, but also one of the more intelligent and conscientious (partly because he refuses to be stereotyped?). Anne Flannery as the bored young wife of the elderly 'professor' who plays little-girl games with other people's feelings is at times very good, at others a little strained.

This production of 'Uncle Vanya' is a fine disturbing piece of theatre at its best — when it enriches understanding and, at the same time, questions the theatregoer's presumptions and his own communication lines. Chekhov's criticism is not confined to the bored and insensitive. The play is, ultimately, a plea for self respect and knowledge, without which communication is tenuous at best.

Tartuffe:

by Moliere. University Drama Society. Reviewed by Cathy Wylie.

"Tartuffe" was written as a satire against the hypocrisy of concealing manipulation beneath an ideological front. Moliere's barbs are directed equally at the gullibility of those duped, those who place importance on exterior attributes (right dress, right vocabulary... rather than the hidden interior, Unfortunately, Diane Hawker's production, imaginative and well staged as it is gives the dupes sympathy, and thus converts the play from comedy to an uneasy melodrama. Jeremy Littlejohn's Tartuffe, the pious masquerade who seeks to seduce Orgon of home, property and spouse, is too credibly evil, which makes it hard to see him as an object of ridicule. Orgon himself, played by Peter White, comes close to being comic, but somehow always misses, becoming in turn pathetic and authoritarian-again too credibly for the needs of the play.

Much of the dialogue, particularly in the first half is inaudible: the cast try to imitate a sleightness of speech which takes years to master, and successfully distance the audience in a blur of emoted syllables. Some of the minor parts seem uneasy, a little forced; two mysterious stagehands in stockinged heads, feet muffled elaborately change furniture between scenes, which arouses associations in my mind far from the theme of 'Tartuffe', and were in general, one of the main sources of amusement for the sparse audience. The whole production comes close to comedy but never masters it completely. It's a very interesting failure with a director 'who should go far' as the saying goes. Certainly the production did not fail because of a lack of thought, or from an attempt to try too hard and to show how exciting, how daring she could be, unlike other more pretentious university productions.