At Volcano Theatre |
| Volcano Theatre- This Imaginary Woman , Chapter Arts Centre , March 14, 2003 |
| For an unrelenting 70 minutes, the sensational Fern Smith stalks the stage as the howling grief-laden daughter of the imaginary mother: as Death, as redeemer, as mother herself of the dead mother. It is a requiem – a mass for the repose of the souls of the dead – a communion with the dead and yet Fern Smith is extraordinarily alive. This is the key to the piece: the tension between death and the vitality of grief and the paradoxes legion in this relationship summed up at the end of the piece in the paraphrase of TS Eliot’s magnificently eloquent line from the Journey of the Magi: "were we led all that way for Birth or Death…” If eloquence can contain anger alongside beauty and despair alongside hope then in the lapidary Smith there is eloquence abounding as she makes statuesque stone of her sensual flesh. And there is eloquence in the music: Velvet Underground out of Kurt Weill delivered by Patrick Fitzgerald with a marvellous strident sensitivity (paradoxes! Paradoxes!) and Fern Smith is Patti Smith out of Lotte Lenya: sexy and sadistic. The actress hovers in a contrived fog suspended between death and living; between the past and the present; between wistfulness and bitterness; between resignation and defiance. It is the fog of the aesthetic in which all are re-born. In the stolen physicality of the mother (who had suffered from MS) is the volcanic physicality of the performer and in her outpouring in a remarkable, devastating closing passage in which she is Ophelia and Lear: all the unjustly dead and those maddened by the various grievings of familial love, every apparently small life is honoured. |
Reviewed by: Dic Edwards |
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