Women in the spotlight: Joanna Kirkland and Yolanda Kettle. Photo credit: Skirmantas Petraitis
Play: Shutters
Theatre: Park Theatre
Playwrights: Brooke Allen, Philip Dawkins and Susan Glaspell
Director: Jack Thorpe Baker
Review by Maria Teresa Sette
A kaleidoscope of women’s lives as they grapple with intricate family dynamics, social prejudices, love and grief is at the heart of Shutters – Snapshots of life behind closed doors.
The latest endeavour by director Jack Thorpe Baker is a triptych of American plays featuring a revival of Trifles, a pioneering feminist work written by Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Glaspell in 1916, and two European premieres – Cast of Characters and The Deer by Chicago-based playwrights Philip Dawkins and Brooke Allen respectively.
A spectacularly convincing all-female cast, switch between male and female roles and leads the audience into a timeless (yet fragmented) feminine journey across three distinct narratives.
The most experimental of the three is Philip Dawkins’ Cast of Characters, a play we never see performed. Through snapshots of descriptions rather than any real characterisation, we are thrown into a tangled net of family relations among three sisters – Liz, Marie and Vicky – their ‘half-sister’ brother Frank and their mother Bernice.
A partial tragi-comic portrait of each family member is delivered through flashback and caricature. Take Marie, 47, Bernice’s youngest daughter. A part-time librarian and children’s storyteller. Vegetarian. Methodist and begrudgingly entering the menopause.
Occasionally the sardonic recitation of biographies is interrupted by the voiceover of an excessively intrusive playwright (Lolly Susi) who rebukes the actors every time they seem to depart from the script. The play’s rhythm is fast-paced. The tone is ironic and although at times somewhat arduous to follow, the final result is an entertaining and thought-provoking play.
Sandwiched between the two contemporary plays is the classic American drama Trifle. This one-act minimalist work by Susan Glaspell is loosely based on a true story of murder case that the writer had covered a few years earlier while a young reporter in Iowa.
Farmer John Wright has been strangled with a rope around his neck while he lay asleep in the middle of the night. The case is being investigated by the village’s attorney (an excellent Lucia McAnespie) and the sheriff (Beverley Longhurst). Both men believe that Wright’s wife Minnie killed him, but they can’t prove it. So they go to the house with Mr Hale (Matilda Thorpe), who was first person on the scene.
While the men, who are logical and patronising, search for evidence, two local women (Nicola Blackman and Joanna Kirkland) are able to piece together the events by gathering the details the men see as just “women’s trifles”. Eventually it’s the women’s empathy with Minnie Wright that allows them to find the evidence the men overlooked.
With Trifles, director Jack Thorpe Baker and his cast manage to build an atmosphere of suspenseful thriller with strong performances by the actors.
Finally Brooke Allen’s The Deer tells the story of a tragic car accident and of a bizarre encounter between a girl and a deer. It explores the intimate and lyrical experience of grief, love and sibling relationships in short dramatic sketches and humorous interludes.
Yolanda Kettle is a radiant Clara, a history graduate whose young brother Russ has decided to drop out of college and go see the world. Determined to dissuade him, she meets his professor John and the two fall in love. The events create a whirl of love and death, beautifully mimicked in balletic movements.
As the tension builds, light relief is provided by streetwise vagabond Winnie who Russ meets during his travel across the West, played by a resoundingly funny Nicola Blackman.
All the three short plays offer – in different ways – clever and engrossing insights into the intimate world of women across different times in history. What Thorpe Baker has done is connect them with masterly directorial touches.
Watching Shutters is an hour and a half well spent.
Shutters is at Park Theatre until 3 August 2014.