Inspired by the life and creations of a fascinating Australian author, Eve Langley, Brisbane-based company the nest ensemble explore an intriguing character through her own perceptions of her conflicted life and times.
Opening in Eve’s later days, scribbling in her hut, one’s attention is grabbed immediately by the dramatic silhouette behind a light curtain. Pausing only for extravagant declamations before literally tearing away the veil, Eve’s recollected life unfolds in a dreamlike fashion, meandering through her experiences and thoughts, interacting with her alter-ego, Oscar Wilde, and occasionally disrupted by the demands of her husband, infant children or a nurse ‘bearing a lamington’. The opening and closing episodes do not shy away from the macabre circumstances of Eve’s death, with its rat-nibbled, decaying features, and entailed rejection of domestic tranquillity.
Interwoven through the story of Eve’s life is the narrative of Wilde’s short story, ‘The Selfish Giant’, punctuated by Eve’s loss of confidence in her self-identity and her recurrent measured questioning of the audience: ‘If I were alive today, would you consider me mad?’ While not linear, the presentation highlights the logic of her choices as she makes them, while simultaneously discussing her diagnosis of schizophrenia and various literary obsessions. Eve’s life is that of a person out of her time, unable to reconcile her grand dreams with the banality of marital expectations – quietly making cups of tea, like the other wives do.
Displaying an astounding emotional range, Margi Brown Ash plays an Eve full of joyous energy, with a twinkle in her eye and a mischievous grin, making it impossible not to sympathise with the woman who found deliverance through her fertile imagination while incarcerated as a ‘defective person’. Latter, she takes us through Eve’s self-doubt upon release, and her dismayed inability to re-connect with the dapper, resilient Wilde within.
Philip Miolin as The Storyteller brings his mellifluous, resonant voice and expressive eyes to the stage, and is an enthusiastic participation in Eve’s whims and fancies. Roland Adeney participates as the stand in for The Husband and his symbolic representation of a rejected, mundane life. He also provides live musical accompaniment. The symbolism does not end with his silent Husband part, with his adaptable violin work moving from long bowed notes to fiddle-style agitation, and from a conventionally static musician to frenetic zest as he chases Eve about the stage.
The sumptuous set abounds in quirky details, using a lever system to produce a cascade of leaves and the dread thump of a returned manuscript hitting the floor. Tessa Darcey, the designer, is to be commended for the multiplicity of uses found for a patched together curtain, torn down to commence the action, then further torn and deployed as infant characters, bed linen, and Emily Dickinson’s posthumously discovered poems.
Eve is a deeply considered, richly constructed celebration of a determinedly extravagant life, and questions our perceptions of degrees of madness, eccentricity, and the creative spirit.
Eve
Presented by The Blue Room Theatre and the nest ensemble
Inspired and influenced by the fiction and letters of Eve Langley
Writer & Co-Deviser: Margi Brown Ash
Director & Co-Deviser: Leah Mercer
Co-Deviser: Daniel Evans
Designer: Tessa Darcey
Lighting Designer: Chris Donnelly
Costume Designer: Bev Jensen
Sound Designer: Travis Ash
Composers: Roland Adeney & Moshlo
Producer: Leah Mercer
Production Manager: Jennifer Friend
Stage Manager: Kennah Parker
Performers: Margi Brown Ash, Philip Miolin & Roland Adeney
The Blue Room Theatre, Perth Cultural Centre
23 October – 10 November
