The Night Season
The Sunday Age
Sunday March 20, 2005
WHERE: Red Stitch, St Kilda. Tel: 9533 8083 WHEN: To April 9 TICKETS: $20/$15 ***
Rebecca Lenkiewicz's The Night Season, set in Ireland and first performed in London last year, concerns itself with the Kennedy family: father Patrick (Peter Curtin), daughters Judith (Kate Cole), Rose (Ella Caldwell) and Maud (Simone Ray), and the girls' maternal grandmother, Lily (Diana Greentree). Their life is shaken up when they take a boarder, John (David Whiteley), an English actor on location to film the lead in a Yeats biopic. Rose falls for him and so, in a more innocent way, does Lily. Meanwhile Judith, the eldest of the three girls, is planning a trip to London to visit their mother Esther, whose absence haunts the household.Lenkiewicz's play comes wrapped in a fair amount of nostalgia. Little of the contemporary Ireland makes it here. It both trades on and makes fun of the old Irish romanticism (Judith's ex-lover Gary, played by Brett Cousins, stands out in the cold looking up at her window, just like the boy in James Joyce's The Dead, except that here it turns out he is watching her sister). Lenkiewicz also knows how to use boozy sentiment perfectly well.Ailsa Piper, directing for the first time, and her cast of seven approach this material with feeling and energy - maybe too much energy. There is a lot of scampering, mugging and writhing, and you wonder if they haven't been too enthusiastic in channelling the piece's farcical, stage-Irish register.
© 2005 The Sunday Age