2018: Switzerland by Joanna Murray-Smith

Switzerland by Joanna Murray-Smith.  Pigeonhole Theatre at Canberra Theatre Centre, Courtyard Studio, July 3-14, 2018.

Director – Jordan Best; Designer – Michael Sparks; Lighting Designer – Cynthia Jolley Rogers; Props – Yanina Clifton; Composer – Matthew Webster.

Performed by

Karen Vickery – Patricia Highsmith
Lachlan Ruffy – Edward Ridgeway

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 4

Karen Vickery and Lachlan Ruffy
as Patricia Highsmith and Edward Ridgeway
in Switzerland by Joanna Murray-Smith
Photo: David James McCarthy

Joanna Murray-Smith has written a quite remarkable play.  Not only does Switzerland play cleverly and wittingly with the genre of murder mystery, the form for which Patrica Highsmith is famous when creating the character Ripley in The Talented Mr Ripley (1955), and, of course, the form which made Agatha Christie compulsory reading in my mother’s generation.

In this play, Murray-Smith has created two characters – one based on Patricia Highsmith (1921 – 1995) and the other presumably entirely fictional Edward Ridgeway, supposedly sent from Highsmith’s New York publisher to her retreat in Switzerland to persuade her to write one more Mr Ripley novel before she dies.

Pigeonhole’s direction, design and casting are all up to the standard well-established since their original offering (Playhouse Creatures by April de Angelis, reviewed on this blog March 2016) – with the added intensity of a demanding confrontational two-act two-hander.  Our attention never wavered, watching Karen Vickery’s aggression and Lachlan Ruffy’s determination.

Two aspects of this play interested me - Murray-Smith’s inventive twist of the murder mystery convention and her interpretation of the psychology of Patrica Highsmith.  The central twist is that Edward Ridgeway, in standing up to Highsmith’s contumely, morphs into the character she had created.  He becomes Mr Ripley and murders his creator.  So she dies before writing the last Mr Ripley novel, after all.  Or did the real Highsmith complete the work, Ripley Under Water (published 1991), and then was metaphorically murdered when she died in 1995?

It is Murray-Smith’s interpretation of what this means that fascinates me.  At this point I have not read all the research material that I assume Murray-Smith has (you can start at https://www.biography.com/people/patricia-highsmith-121715 ), but I wonder why Murray-Smith’s Highsmith insists on her lesbian sexuality, and for the right of women to be equal and independent against society’s patriarchal forces, yet at the end of the play appears to have fallen for Edward Ridgeway / Mr Ripley – and he for her – making their encounter apparently essentially sexual rather than professionally platonic, in an all-encompassing kiss.  After which, as she turns away in contemplation of the experience, he kills her with her favourite knife, which he had given her, taken down from the display of guns, swords and knives which cover the wall of her writing space.  (The other play you might like to consider at this point is Le Leçon by Eugene Ionesco).

Is she simply thanking Ripley / Ridgeway for her writing success?  Is she denying her lesbian nature?  Are we to take this as a political statement in support of sexual difference and the right to individuality; or are we to think Murray-Smith sees Highsmith as psychologically disturbed – that her writing and creating fictional characters is/was more real than reality?

Could it even mean that Murray-Smith herself is concerned about her own psychological state as a writer?  Or that all creatives live in “a world of their own”, as Murray-Smith’s Patricia Highsmith says she does?

And does this make Switzerland and its author something unusual and even “great” in Australian writing? 

I leave that consideration for my readers, but in my view Joanna Murray-Smith wittingly challenges patriarchal society in Switzerland.







© Frank McKone, Canberra