Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 28
Playwright: Laura Wade (UK)
Director: Janine Watson
Set Designer: Michael Hankin; Costume Designer: Genevieve Graham
Lighting Designer: Morgan Moroney; Video Designer: Mark Bolotin
Composer & Sound Designer: Jessica Dunn
Dialect Coach: Linda Nicholls-Gidley; Movement Coach: Tim Dashwwod
Intimacy Coordinator: Chloë Dallimore; Costume Supervisor: Lily Matelian
Asst Stage Manager: Bernadett Lörincz
Cast:
Myra – Hannah Waterman; Alec – Huw Higginson
Their adult daughters Jenna – Airlie Dodds and Harriet – Charlotte Friels
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| Airlie Dodds, Huw Higginson, Hannah Waterman, Charlotte Friels as Jenna, Alec, Myra and Harriet in Colder Than Here by Laura Wade, Ensemble Theatre 2024 |
This is Ensemble’s summary of Colder Than Here:
Myra’s
typically middle-class family are scarily normal in their
eccentricities, especially when it comes to dealing with her illness.
The boiler is on the blink, the cat’s gone missing and the perfect
funeral needs planning but her husband Alec would rather bury his head
in a newspaper while daughters Harriet and Jenna have their own
problems. Myra might be busy researching flatpack coffins and creating a
PowerPoint presentation of her dying wishes, but her last big project
is to fix her family.
In my early years I was brought up in
this London, wearing Wellington boots to walk to school, perennially
cold in the smog. So I could sympathise with the idea of a play about a
woman, diagnosed with terminal cancer, and her family trying to find
somewhere nicer for her to die and to be buried.
In 2005, at
least the titles of Laura Wade’s first plays – Colder Than Here and
Breathing Corpses – suggest things were getting her down a bit, even
though they won the writer the [UK] Critics' Circle Theatre Award for
Most Promising Playwright.
So I’m sorry to have to say that I
felt for the actors, having to struggle with a script which can’t really
make up its mind whether to be a comedy or a sentimental but nice
homily about being realistic about death.
As a comedy it begins
well with Myra’s attempt at a Powerpoint presentation of how she wants
to prepare for the inevitable. But the boiler on the blink business (by
the way, the extension lead plug that Alec tries to fix is a sealed
unit which cannot be taken apart, so his jabbing himself with his
screwdriver is just silly) and what happened to Jenna’s cat, and whether
Jenna’s relationships with her boyfriends have or will hold up, and why
Harriet seems to be so inexplicably dependent on her mother, get in the
way of comedy.
Yet the possibilities of drama of depth never develop either in this playscript.
Fortunately
it is the set design and video projection that rescue the play as far
as it can go. As the daughters look for locations for the burial, the
backdrop image of a calm and attractive woodland scene (well away from
whether the boiler in the house really did ever get fixed) made it
almost acceptable for Myra to lie down on her side there and slowly roll
on to her back as she dies (having lasted till a warmer time in summer)
– because (as we know from the earler scene with the cardboard coffin)
she wouldn’t fit in if she stayed the way she sleeps.
Yet that
final scene is quite unrealistic. From what Myra tells Jenna, husband
Alec is now busy fixing things around the house himself – so he’s not
there with her. What Harriet is doing is not clear – but she’s not
there either. And then, Jenna leaves her mother to it – to die alone.
Perhaps
the author meant this to have sad and telling implications about people
not facing up to death, but I found after the beginning warmth of a
little bit of comedy, the rest of the play – except for the very last
moment – left me cold.
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| Hannah Waterman as Myra in the final scene of Colder Than Here by Laura Wade Ensemble Theatre, 2024 |
©Frank McKone, Canberra
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