Honed To Suit The Imagination

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday October 6, 2007

Reviewed by Mark Hopkins

THEATRE

ONE MORE THAN ONE/ AN UNFORTUNATE WOMAN

Darlinghurst Theatre, October 4

TWO well-seasoned one-hour shows are sharing Darlinghurst Theatre and each is proof that imagination is alive and well in independent theatre.

One More than One was devised by the performers Emma Hawkins and Keith Lim in late 2005, first presented at Darlinghurst Theatre's In the Raw Festival, revived for Dance Bites at Riverside Theatre in 2006, and returns to Darlinghurst in excellent form.

The rapport between Hawkins and Lim remains fresh, and this engaging piece employs their disparate physicality to compelling effect.

Hawkins is a feisty redhead, short-statured, looking for a mate online but prepared to get tactile. She finds a six-foot-plus Asian computer gamer (Lim), whose obsessive patterns of behaviour do not prevent an appreciation of nature's random beauty. After a measured start in which insecurities and vulnerabilities are articulated and enacted, a delightfully robust relationship is established and explored, especially physically.

The movement sequences are striking for their imagery and beguiling in their intimacy and subtle eroticism. The contesting and negotiating of two people so contrasting in size but so alert to each other's form is engrossing.

An Unfortunate Woman, written and performed by Nicola Gunn, has also been honed in performance at a number of festivals, comedy and fringe.

Through some 13 roles, including a British bulldog, Gunn presents a delicately tragic tale of domestic betrayal, guilt and failure with an enchanting mix of mime and comic characterisation.

Clara Dubois wishes to celebrate the birthday of her husband, Henry, but hesitates to invite her psychiatrist son, Hubert, now nearly 50 but with an unfortunate wife of his own, the American, who has a thing for men in uniform, like postmen and gardeners. Stanley Trundle, a clerk at the Registry of Births and Deaths, will ultimately make sense of the misfortune plaguing this family but not before visiting the psychiatrist himself to help address his escapist delusions.

While it takes a little while to be drawn fully into this incongruously male-dominated world of eccentric, flawed and ultimately cleverly linked characters, once interrelationships become clear, Gunn masterfully balances melancholy and whimsy to make the saddest outcome the gentlest of destinations.

Both productions have evocative and sensitively nuanced sound and lighting designs. The lingering impression remains that of skilled theatre-makers transforming an empty space into a most imaginative realm of human foible.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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