by Stephenie Cahalan
Tasmanian Theatre Company
Director, Sue Benner and Assistant
director Ivano Del Pio
Featuring Rowan Harris, Karissa Lane, Jane
Longhurst, Jeff Michel
With cars left behind in the safety of a Sandy Bay
car park, we boarded a minibus and rode through the streets of Hobart’s
well-appointed middle class into another era. The bus exited the kerbed bitumen
and climbed a winding dirt track to reach an architectural icon.
Fort Nelson House is a rounded, glass
eyrie that describes its owner and designer Esmond Dorney as craving both
openness and seclusion. The dwelling, which evolved over several
iterations between 1966 and 1978, is surrounded by 78 acres of native bush
overlooking the Tasman Peninsula, Bruny Island and the Meehan Range. The house
and property, now owned and managed by the Hobart City Council, is rarely open
to the public.
Yet, for a few weeks in November, Fort
Nelson House became the venue for the 1960s classic drama Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?, staged by the Tasmanian Theatre Co.The effect of entering
the home was not just that of arriving at a venue, with all the marvelous
pre-show anticipation that live theatre invokes. It gave the feeling of being
locked into the dramatic space… and like hiding behind the curtains at a
surprise party before the subject arrives. As two more busloads of patrons were
delivered, the atmosphere built into a palpable air of apprehension.
The stage — the living room — was a stylish,
circular sunken floor facing the metre-wide tiled fireplace; a tribute to a
time when design ruled, and council compliance was but a spectre looming in the
future. The audience mingled around the multilevel shag-pile carpeted steps,
exposed flue and the vinyl-clad cushions rimming what would become the
conversation pit of despair.
Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?
by Edward Albee concerns two couples at distinctly different stages in life.
George and Martha have traveled quite some way down the road of disappointment,
their relationship curdled and neither partner’s career or family dreams
realised. Nick and Honey are young and ambitious, beholden to the prescription
for success in a small-town college. The drama is set very late at night in a
booze-sodden living room.
I studied the play in high school and Albee’s
skilled manipulation of language and tension was clear even to this
17-year-old, inducing the same feeling of dread prompted by the cheesy horror
films that were preferred viewing at the time. The opportunity to watch the
play as an adult, for whom the concept of relationships and unrealised
expectation now has more resonance, was a rare treat.
Fort Nelson House has been unoccupied for several
years, offering a blank canvas for designer Paul Rubie and stage manager Max
Ford. House and stage blended seamlessly, and we in the small audience became
voyeurs peering into an acutely uncomfortable domestic scene. The attention to
detail invoked the era impeccably, without crowding out essential elements,
such as the all-important drinks trolley. Martha’s grand entrance was made even
more formidable by her fabulous satin, burnt orange dress. The hair
complemented the costuming beautifully. Martha and Honey’s stylish coifs
declined to ragged mops throughout the course of the play.
This well-set scene placed even more
expectation on the performers to live up to the venue and staging, and each
actor rose to that challenge magnificently. Jane Longhurst as Martha was so
glamorous and outrageously awful, it was hard not to cover the eyes. The
bullying seductiveness of Martha was powerfully met by Jeff Michel’s sneakily
vicious portrayal of George. This was critical to the success of the play, if
we were to be at all convinced by the credibility of their brutal partnership.
Honey and Nick’s submissiveness were reminiscent of
small prey being hypnotised by a snake. Most of the adult nuances sailed over
my head as a teenage reader, but one thing that I did remember grasping was how
the younger, impressionable couple could not extract themselves from the
manipulation of the older, more experienced pair. Karissa Lane’s portrayal of
Honey was comic and original, providing desperately needed light relief. Rowan
Harris conjured the barely-disguised vanity and ambition behind Nick’s
seemingly ‘regular guy’ guise. All four performers arrived at the finish line
of the grueling emotional marathon looking cool and solid.
So effective was the performance that taking the
bus back down the hill to reality was a bit like gratefully catching a ride out
of a bad party. The play is not to everyone’s taste, described by one
fellow patron as ‘a bit overwrought’. Yet for me, that performance of that play
in that place left me feeling like I had just seen something really very
special.
