| Inspiration from tragedy |
At Volcano Theatre |
| Volcano Theatre- This Imaginary Woman , Chapter Arts Centre , March 14, 2003 |
| WE ALL find our ways of working through the effects of bereavement and artists have often found inspiration in the death of loved ones. But it's rare to have to confront the immediacy of a performer sharing her personal crisis with us as she explores her responses to her mother's death from multiple sclerosis. After all, should we not be suspicious of someone who earns a living by pretending and who now tries to convince us that this is a real person, not a character, searching her soul in front of an audience? Not Fern Smith of Volcano Theatre, better known for their coruscating dis-section of contemporary mores with an exciting mixture of intelligence and physicality. She has always been a charismatic and passionate stage presence and here she has no problem in convincing us of her integrity as well as her performance skills. Indeed, this remarkable piece of theatre, premiered at Chapter Arts Centre, in Cardiff, is clearly driven by artistic ambition as much as the need to come to terms with bereavement. With musician Patrick Fitzgerald, Fern Smith both meticulously exploits her professional skills and explores new performance techniques, as if the personal trauma has stimulated new methods of artistic inquiry as much as caused emotional confusion. She uses her voice, for example, to produce the strangest sounds, sounds that express something more than simple loss or lament or pain or despair. The piece is performed as a series of monologues and songs and the effect is that of a kind of postmodernist French chanson singer emerging from an emotional maelstrom. It is spiked with pastiche, confession with vision, memory with guilt. Gluck, TS Eliot and Shakespearean tragedy are drawn on. It's more than an elegy, more than in memoriam, more than an atonement for not being present at her mother's death, but a process of coming-to-terms with an emptiness and of resolution. I found myself curiously uninvolved, a witness to rather than a participant in a cathartic and essentially personal ritual. A mesmeric, uncomfortable, unique, awesome performance. * This Imaginary Woman will tour Wales in the spring. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
This review has been read 2719 times There are 31 other reviews of productions with this title in our database:
|
