Not A Boring Life (Yvette Wall’s latest play) gets going even before it starts, the set itself offering the audience a laugh and a challenge before the cast have even entered the stage.
A rather bold painting, volcanically mammillary, hung at an ostentatiously crooked angle, immediately draws the eye. From between the tracts of land comes running water: you could almost imagine a biblical patriarch hovering nearby in hopes of meeting a wife. What, I found myself wondering, is this all about? Who would hang this painting in their living room?
This intrigue is followed by a subversively slow start, as the play’s exposition is cunningly drawn out. Three women – Marion (Fiona Forster), Susan (Colleen Bradford), and Charis (Yvette Wall) – laugh together and chat, seemingly about nothing. I found myself confused and even bored by this, but beyond that a gendered reaction was provoked: words to the effect of ‘what are these women wittering about?’ went through my head.
Eventually, it is made clear that they are gathered for a bawdy kind of wake, for a woman of their peer group who has died.
I can remember, many years ago, being at the conference of a political party. A middle-aged senator, a woman, talked about how invisible she was: how she was ignored, and how this was her default experience of life. She spoke with passion and pain, and her words stayed with me. Life in parliament, life while at the shops, life everywhere else: wherever she was, she went unseen.
From its beginning, this invisibility, gendered and awful, is made the central subject of the play. The audience is cannily drawn into participating in it, and then it is picked apart, piece by piece.
I won’t retell the whole plot of the play: but we see, rather magnificently, each character come alive in different ways. Colleen Bradford provides perhaps the most memorable depiction of this process, lunging about the stage with startling vigour, brandishing a rather male symbol, discovered intriguingly conceiled behind the feminine. This process of invigoration is paired with the progressive revelation of unknown aspects of their dead friend’s life. As the previously hidden aspects of that person’s life are revealed, the invisible women are themselves revealed.
Around half-way through the play, Mrs Partridge (Kerry Goode) is introduced; and we are taken, chaotically, through the same trajectory from invisibility to visibility. An older woman, the personhood of Partridge is at first invisible even to her fellow women. Through the chaos inflicted upon her by those friends she comes alive, even as events take their toll upon her.
This second act of the play transitions to incorporate much more slapstick humour, and this humour accords with the deeper message of the work. As characters revel in pure chaos, laughing together (joined enthusiastically by the audience), they become suddenly visible to us, their depth and personhood disclosed.
This work speaks to the damage that gender discrimination inflicts upon personhood: a theme of Wall’s that was also evident in her prior work, Ladies Who Wait. The common thread there was the trauma shared by its women: here it is the failure of society to realise that women are alive at all.
And that’s what I took away from this play: the woman who has worked at the supermarket for twenty years, who I might blithely walk past in the vegetable aisle without any consideration at all, is a person. A person with the same depth and magnifence and horror as anyone else: but so often overlooked – not even objectified, but simply, cruelly, invisible.
Through the play’s conclusion, the viewer is caused to realise that none of its characters came alive at all: they were always alive, and magnificently so. And so a challenge is offered to open our eyes and see every other person, without discrimination. It is a challenge that is needed, and particularly by people like me. I applaud this work.
Disclosure: I received complementary review tickets to this play. You can purchase tickets through Fringeworld.
(Photo pinched from the Fringe website.)