 Claudia Clark and Aaron Orzech
Time
with Mrs Thompson is a new riff on an old subject – a young man meets
an older woman. Twenty-one-year-old James (Aaron Orzech) drops by a
friend’s house one afternoon and gets chatting to his friend’s mother, Mrs
Thompson (Claudia Clark). No big deal, just chitchat – well, at
first. Mrs Thompson is a housewife, a widow, and seems eager just to have
someone, anyone really, to talk to.
But
as the conversation continues, with Mrs Thompson rustling up a glass – or three
or four – of wine, they begin to find each other interesting. James feels
that Mrs Thompson, whom he is soon urged to call Annie, is different from his
parents; more honest, and certainly nicer to him. Annie feels that
James is perceptive and emotionally intelligent. Wise beyond his years,
in fact; a notion she persists with even when James makes quite an effort to
disabuse her of it.
This
production is effectively staged but there’s a rather uneasy blend of
naturalism and theatricality at work. The actors use the venue door as
the front door of Annie’s house and the lighting is simple, but at the same
time recorded sound effects are used and there a formality to the actor’s
movements. It would have been more effective to either use artifice
throughout (with stage lights drawing the audience into a more intimate space)
or else to maintain a consistently natural style.
Just
as James and Annie’s conversation is at first stilted but becomes more
compelling, so too does the play. For a while the pacing seems off, the
dialogue delivered too quickly with few natural pauses allowed to
develop. There’s some of that style of writing where characters
constantly mishear or misunderstand (‘Pardon?’ ‘Did you mean…?’ ‘What?’),
which is supposed to be suspenseful but comes across as mannered and
unnecessary.
Luckily
this trope is abandoned as the characters find more and more unusual things to
talk about: alcohol and how it is abused by the young; Annie’s personal
misfortune, including a curse that kills the males in her family; James’s
girlfriends. Some delightfully unexpected moments emerge, like an
amusing reference to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate or Annie’s confession that
she once wanted to change her name.
The
actors do a nice job of making James and Annie different enough for their
connection to be surprising, but not so at odds that it feels forced. Clark
plays Annie as a recognisable ‘type’, the almost aggressively upbeat
middle-aged woman, grateful, always smiling – until finally her inner turmoil
is allowed to emerge. Orzech’s performance is rather freewheeling but is
most effective in the quieter, restrained moments.
But
although there is enough of a twist on the material to spark interest, and some
great little detours, the play doesn’t go quite far enough with what it is
attempting (in fact it does seem a little unfinished, with the ending coming
rather abruptly).
The
Graduate used the idea of a young man seduced by an older woman as a sort of
political protest but it didn’t have much empathy for the woman herself – she
was predatory, selfish. Benjamin didn’t seriously entertain a future with
Mrs Robinson and she comes to represent part of the problem, what he is running
away from. In Time with Mrs Thompson, on the other hand, there is
a concerted effort to deal with the older woman as a real person, as someone deserving
of exploration and understanding.
And
yet Annie does become a bit of a cliché. Though she has her eyes wide
open in choosing to become involved with James, her confidence does not go
unpunished. Without spoiling the ending, there seems to be some moral
judgement involved, which takes the play back into more conventional
territory.
It
is also made clear that Annie admires James for his mind, for his wit and
insights, while James’s infatuation with Annie is more in the realm of a sexual
fantasy – she’s not ashamed of her body like the girls he knows, she’s not a
blank canvas, she’s ‘experienced’. Perhaps unintentionally then, the
play focuses on James and what he wants. Annie is enamoured of James
because of who he is, while James just likes the ego boost of Annie’s interest
in him, but doesn’t imagine they really see each other.
James
even starts to feel a bit sorry for himself, believing that, at 21, he is not
to be taken seriously as he doesn’t really know what he wants. In a way,
then, the play is a plea for understanding between the generations, with each
jealous of what the other has. James envies Annie’s comfortable stability
(he can’t stop admiring her house, for instance, although to her it’s just her
‘prison’). Annie finds James’s youthful eccentricity fascinating, but
doesn’t understand why he is so aghast at the idea of making decisions, like
getting married, as she did at his age.
James
thinks he can provide the answers to Annie’s problems – all she really needs is
to let go of convention and get out into the world – while Annie doesn’t see
that James, with all his freedom and charm and youth, really has any
problems. This is one misunderstanding that seems right on the money.
La Mama presents
Time With Mrs.Thompson
by Gareth Ellis
(a rated PG production)
Directed by Peta Coy
Venue: La Mama, 205 Faraday St Carlton
Dates/Times: Nov 28 – Dec 16 Wed, Fri, Sun 6.30pm; Thurs & Sat 8.30pm
Tickets: $20/$10
Duration: 60 minutes approx.
Bookings: 9347 6142
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