I Am Yours
The Sunday Age
Sunday June 12, 2005
THEATRE REVIEW: WHERE: Red Stitch, rear 2 Chapel St, St Kilda. Tel: 9533 8083 WHEN: To July 2 TICKETS: $25-$15 **?
Beautiful Dee (Olivia Connolly) leaves her husband Mack (Dion Mills), and her plain sister Mercy (Kat Stewart) is abandoned by hers. Mercy turns up on Dee's doorstep just as Dee is getting involved, in a random and ultimately disastrous way, with the supervisor of her building, Toilane (Adam Hunter).I am Yours, by the prolific and critically acclaimed Canadian playwright Judith Thompson, is an excursion into a kind of domestic surrealism, full of naturalist properties yet psychologically and verbally bizarre.At first I was bored by it: the stylised unreality of the situations and the mannered writing didn't engage me; the whole thing just looked as if it was happening behind glass and was literary in the worst sense. But the accumulated weirdness of it starts to get to you, and by the time Toilane and his mother Peggy (Irene Korsten) are making clear that they intend to make sure Dee doesn't adopt out the baby Toilane has given her after a one-night stand, you start to see the mythic or fairytale outlines behind the story. All of a sudden you're involved and even fascinated, though you may not actually like the thing for all that.Rochelle Whyte's direction shows real inwardness with the piece, which cannot have been an easy thing to achieve. As ever the Red Stitch troupe give it their all.
© 2005 The Sunday Age