Friday 18 May 2018

Good Cook, Friendly, Clean; Griffin, Stables

After she loses her spot in a share house, 50ish Sandra is sent into a spiral looking for somewhere else to live. As her explorations continue, her situation becomes more and more desperate. How do you survive sudden homelessness at an age when life should be settled?

This kinda didn't work for me. The structure (with each scene featuring Tara Morice's Sandra and different characters in each scene played by Faysall Bazzi and Kelly Paterniti) means there's only one character we really get any insight into, and she's constantly repeating roughly the same situation, seeking their approval to share their house. While Bazzi and Paterniti do good work differentiating the various characters, they're pretty shallow figures, and Morice doesn't necessarily have a lot more to work with - up until near the end you don't get much more of Sandra than a loose outline - the various encounters don't so much illuminate who she is as paint her as an everywoman eager to adapt to whatever other people want her to be. We never really get much sense of what she's been doing with her last 50 years on the planet - what's caused her to be so rootless that she can be chucked aside so easily? The final scenes should hurt much more than they do - there's not much interest in seeing a cyper tortured.

Marion Potts' production is mostly efficient without being spectacular.

This ends up landing more as a good theme for a play that never got depth added beyond the log-line.