Blue Murder by Beatrix Christian. Eureka! at The Street Theatre, directed by Camilla Blunden. Season October 17-26, 1996. Professional.
In the foyer: - I'm still thinking about it - I need a cigarette - I feel a bit shell-shocked - - Beatrix Christian is a new voice in Australian writing - I felt quite apprehensive about what was going to happen - I thought Eureka! wouldn't be sexy enough for this script - It made me feel quite disturbed, but I can't pinpoint why.
This play is a complex study, in the new form of imagist theatre, of the way men have created the fantasy that their art is more important than reality - even more real than death. In this case, the deaths of the writer's three previous wives. Evelyn, a modern girl, has made her escape from the country town where she seduced the priest behind the pub after her total immersion baptism. Blue wrote the stories Evelyn absorbed as a child - How Howard Saved Father Christmas - and takes her in as his personal live-in assistant. The current working title is Howard the Cynic.
The play begins behind a scrim: we can see reality but are separated from it. When the scrim is removed, we see the fantasy life of the writer directly, without any barrier. The layers of implications are strongly supported in the set design (Michael Wilkinson), lighting design (Philip Lethlean) and the music composed by Margaret Legge-Wilkinson. For Evelyn, the task is to see through the apparent reality of Blue's stories. As she does so, she gains strength - representing all women - and the mythic male as artist is finally and deliberately destroyed.
Christian is important not just as an imagist related to playwrights like the early Louis Nowra and more recently Jenny Kemp, but because she has more powerful language with which she opens up possibilities of meaning. She plays heightened dialogue against the mundane in ways which at first seem surreal, yet create those disturbing feelings in the foyer. I would call her a new symbolist: she is for this century what Strindberg was for the last. Except that Strindberg would have been a Blue - a misogynist whose artistic golden moon has set forever. Strongly recommended.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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