(Paul Slabolepszy
& Bianca Amato. Image taken from a Montecasino poster)
Reviewed at the Hilton
Theatre during the Hilton Arts Festival. (Review by Shannon Kenny)
The humour is dark - it’s a Paul Slabolepszy play, after all.
The set evokes a tiredness in the bar furniture, the plastic table-cloths and yellow walls and one even has this sense it must reek of the smoke from myriad cigarettes lit and stubbed out over decades.
What ensues in their encounter is the pealing back of layers of artifice and emotional body-armour. The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood” the phone calls Aiden avoids answering, Joanna’s Northern Ireland (Derry) accent, the absence of partners, references to the Dome, the Southern Cross and Thabiso all begin to make sense. There’s history, love, pain, regret, trust, loss, displacement, choices and grief; troubles personal and political that never allow you to ‘settle’.
Aiden Stromberg is an affluent engineer from Joburg, the last customer in the café owned and run by Joanna Devlin. The rest of her staff have long since gone home and Joanna needs to lock up. Her Derry accent reveals she’s clearly not a Free State platteland native and she has no problem confiscating Aiden’s car keys because he is in no state to drive. She suggests he rather check in at the local holiday chalets before setting off in the morning.
Aiden demands his keys be returned and so this anti-meet-cute proceeds, first flickering, then bursting with the energy of a dozen wildfires, till it dwindles to a smoulder that leaves the audience a lot less comfortable with our assumptions, prejudices, choices and points of view. And at the top of our audience hive-mind is the question: What has brought them here?
The story unfolds as the conversation by turns morphs from parley, to tete a tete, to debate, to counsel, to consolation - each character divulging snippets of their lives, warm reminiscences, and origin stories with inconvenient truths. Probing questions are asked, sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully. Truths are spoken or shouted, sometimes barbed, sometimes with compassion, empathy. And the answers we get aren’t always the ones we expect.
Written by Paul Slabolepszy and directed by Bobby Heaney, this story of deep love of the romantic kind; love of the kind where you would risk any and everything for the precious life of another; of compassion that goes beyond words; of finding sanctuary in remote places - and people; about trust that allows us to escape to find healing peace and looking to the stars to guide us to our eternal home, to the fulfilment of dreams.
Bianca Amato and Paul Slabolepszy breathe life into their characters through their fine-tuned, nuanced and utterly believable performances. Amato’s portrayal of a single mother who has seen it all - troubles personal and political - is superb. Slabolepszy embodies the elderly curmudgeon with such ease. We are invited into the sanctuary they create on stage and held there till the final bow.
This is theatre that forces you to shift uncomfortably in your seat because it is abrasive and raw in what it lays bare about the human heart. That our joy, our despair, our hope can all exist all at once wrapped up inside us and how we wrestle with any or all of them is uniquely ours to contend with.
In the words of a certain young person in my life: “The purpose of any good art is to make you think and feel, challenge - and maybe even change - your point of view. It’s not meant to just stroke your ego or make you feel comfortable with the way things are. In fact, some art should make you feel uncomfortable - and that’s a good thing, I think.”
This is good art - written, directed, performed. If this play ever comes your way, see it! – Shannon Kenny.
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