Left – Anna Houston and Gareth Reeves. Cover – Gareth Reeves and Anna Houston. Photos – Helen WhiteVenus is Fur is a play within a play, inspired by a book. Written by David Ives, it is a smart, funny, feminist discourse on fetishes, power and female objectification, with elements of a gothic thriller, crackling with suspense and a hint of threat.
Thomas (Gareth Reeves), a New York playwright/director, is getting ready to go home after a tiring and unsuccessful day auditioning actresses for the lead in his new play, Venus in Fur. He is searching for the perfect woman who can play a 19th century aristocrat who possesses elegance, beauty, intelligence, strength and the seductive power to make men submit entirely to her will. But Thomas can’t find his idealised lead woman and despairs that all actresses in their early 20’s are too childish, ignorant or tarty.
In storms Wanda, played by Anna Houston, who delivers a marvellously comic opening scene. Wanda is working class, dishevelled, gauche, late for the audition with a slim understanding of the play and negligible preparation. She appears to be quite wrong for the role, but manages to persuade Thomas that, even though he has packed up and everybody has gone home for the day, he should give her the opportunity to audition. Thomas is instantly overwhelmed by Wanda’s talent for the role.
The play within a play structure offers a great amount of dramatic and comic potential and gives the perfect opportunity to comment on Thomas’s fetishized attitude towards women. His play is an adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Maschoch’s 1870’s sado-masochistic novella, Venus in Fur (from which the term masochism was coined). According to Thomas, Maschoch’s work expresses the pinnacle of romantic love.
As Thomas and Wanda read through the script together Wanda constantly breaks from her 19th century aristocratic character back into her contemporary character to challenge Thomas on his views, making for not only some of the best comic moments in the play but also the most political. At one point she bluntly describes Thomas’s play as full of S&M porn.
Anna Houston’s Wanda is a force of nature: irrepressible, unselfconscious and smart. Houston’s energy is immense and her agile, wily performance is very funny, with just the right dose of menace. She is a very good comic actress and an excellent physical comedian.
The play refers to ambivalence and ambiguity many times in the text and it becomes clear that Wanda is not exactly what she at first appears. She knows the script far better than she initially implied. And she seems to know a great deal more as well.
Gareth Reeves is well cast as Thomas, with a carefully restrained performance that balances Thomas’s wholesome, well brought up charm with his darker side. And while his character is far less flamboyant, Reeves matches Houston’s every parry and jab.
Director, Grace Barnes, has a strong background in directing, among other things, musical theatre and this is very evident in her direction of this show. She effectively establishes the physical push and pull dynamic of the relationship. The two actors interact as they might in a dance, conscious at all times of the shifts in power between them. Like all good “servant/master” plays, from Strindberg to Beckett to Mamet, the dynamic shifts back and forth between the two. Barnes never lets her material – which is essentially about sex and power – to slip into lasciviousness or even eroticism, even though Wanda spends most of the performance in her underwear. The clarity of Barnes’s direction makes the drama more powerful and the ideas more interesting.
The Eternity Theatre is such a beautiful restored space with its stained glass windows, soaring ceilings and very comfortable seats. Designer, Mel Page has staged the play on the flat floor of the auditorium with simply a velvet curtain backdrop, a divan a desk and chair. It perfectly evokes an empty, make shift rehearsal room.
In contrast to the very contemporary comic and snappy nature of the script the lighting and the sound offer gothic interludes of high drama, in keeping with the mounting mystery in the script. Jessica James-Moody’s sound scape includes crashes of thunderbolts and occasional bursts of dramatic 19th century romantic music, while Sian James-Holland's subtle lighting dims and rises spookily with the thunder.
This clever play was a major, Tony winning success on Broadway and the Eternity’s production is very entertaining and engaging.
Darlinghurst Theatre Company presents
VENUS IN FUR
by David Ives
Director Grace Barnes
Venue: The Eternity Playhouse | 39 Burton Street (Cnr Palmer Street), Darlinghurst
Dates: 29 May – 5 July 2015
Tickets: $45 – $38
Bookings: www.darlinghursttheatre.com | 02 8356 9987
