Sydney Reviews

The Lady Grey could be the estranged girlfriend of Thom Pain, the protagonist from Will Eno’s other piece of lecture theatre ‘based on nothing’. Our spare forty minutes with this woman are spent like a reunion between such lovers – intense, referential and based on how well we know each other as people. Together we acknowledge what we have lost and prepare for the inevitable moving on.

Eno’s particular talent is his ability to connect an audience with his characters in the immediacy of performance. His work comments on our relationship with characters – drawing attention here to Lady Grey’s reliance on the audience’s gaze to bring her into existence. Encouraging the actor to question her character, Eno pulls apart his heroine to reveal the seams of theatrical conceit. The Lady Grey refuses to leave the spectator in the dark and instead captures our attention with hypothetical questions and direct-address.

Tanya Burne does an admirable job in keeping The Lady Grey from becoming too obscure. She charms her audience by maintaining eye contact in the not-quite darkened theatre, blending subtle movements with rapid-fire monologue. Eno’s dense prose reads like an existential grocery list, and Burne is heartfelt in her delivery of our human frailties, pausing occasionally to smile at a particularly sly turn of phrase.

Director Julian Meyrick does well to keep the staging simple, using only one chair in this first Australian production of The Lady Grey (in ever-lower light). The text is beautifully written, and there is no need for embellishment. Burne elegantly emerges from and finally evaporates into Casey Norton’s appropriately dim lighting design.

Apparently Burne has spent years vying for the Brookyln-based Eno’s 2005 script. She is now finally performing The Lady Grey in both Sydney and in Melbourne this February, and bringing the playwright along for a Q & A after each 2pm Saturday matinee.

I find it interesting that this production of The Lady Grey is presented by Inscription, a company supposedly dedicated to nurturing Australian scriptwrighting talent. I am not sure what the connection there is between this project and local authors, but their motto – ‘your story’ – was displayed in the theatre lobby.

Eno’s script examines the human inclination to tell stories as a way to validate our existence, and he leaves the audience on a bleak note. As the lights go down at the end of the show The Lady Grey disappears into a void between performances, her worst fear realized. We exit the theatre with a mind full of questions – wondering where she has gone and what part of us she has taken with her.


Inscription presents
Lady Grey (in ever-lower light)
by Will Eno

Director Julian Meyrick

Venue: The Griffin Theatre Company | Stables Theatre
Dates: February 9 to 13
Tickets: $15
Bookings: (02) 8002 4772 | www.griffintheatre.com.au


Venue: Melbourne Theatre Company | Lawler Studio
Dates: February 16 to 20
Tickets: $15
Bookings: (03) 8688 0800 | www.mtc.com.au

Web: www.inscription.com.au