I have to admit I've never seen any John Cassavetes films, let alone the somewhat obscure 1977 film this play is based on - but it's a piece of meta-theatre looking at the process of making theatre and how it often can bare down on the women at the centre of it, relying on them to make material which isn't fleshed out into something greater than it is. There's a modern feel to this as the questions of female agency on stage still haven't fully been thought through and work continues to arrive with limited roles for actresses all too often. Fortunately this is a play that raises the questions and provokes thought about them, even if the resolution is perhaps a little too tidy to entirely resolve everything - and the adaptation to contemporary and local doesn't entirely flow through the material, which feels a little more distanced by a couple of small aesthetic details than maybe it should (the casual smoking and drinking, the way that Australian stage doors work compared to Broadway), but all in all this is an effective thought provoking night out.
Carissa Liacciardello does double duty as adapter and director, to my mind doing better at the second than the first - the dialogue and structure is more functional rather than transcendent, but she does have a great eye for an effective stage image and is able to move in and around the various levels of reality this story tells, from performance-to-rehearsal-to-real-life-to-nightmare and back again with splitsecond timing. She has slightly sabotaged herself by choosing a set by David Fleischer that doesn't really quite suit the Belvoir stage - admittedly this is a set that has to do a lot more than just be its initial state, but the initial impression is that there's a lot of space between the actors and the audience, leading to this being a show that works better as the show slips into the surreal - it's not a show that quite fits into the space where it's being performed.
Leanna Walsmann is a big part of that as Myrtle, the actress with reasonable complains who's never quite listened to like she should be and is therefore driven inwards to find her own solutions. The production is largely built around her - the play is a deep dive seen through her eyes and mentality, and she's barely offstage for the whole 100 minutes of action - and she makes it all fascinating. Elsewhere, Luke Mullins is suitably creepy as the director, reflecting the ego of a man who wants the benefits of the title but is not willing to roll his sleeves up and do the difficult emotional work of exploring the material, Toni Scanlan is interesting as the writer of the play-within-the-play, constantly suggesting possibilities but never really providing concrete assistance, and Matt Zaremes and Jing-xuan Chan don't really have a lot to work with in their small roles as co-star and dresser respectively, and Caitlin Burley is largely a creepy presence rather than a full character as the fangirl Nancy.
Nick Schiliper's split-second lighting deserves almost a co-starring credit as it moves from show-to-life-to-nightmare (alongside his associate Jazime Rizk) and Max Lyndevert's sound design creates good mood too (though competing a bit with an actual storm on the night I saw it).
It's an interesting mood piece that provokes thought about the roles women accept and what happens when they begin to fight against it. - better at being surreal than in the initial scenes that try to establish a reality - I think it's a show I enjoyed thinking about the ideas in it more than the presentation of those ideas. So it probably falls into the category of "interesting" rather than "compelling", but they were good thoughts to be provoked.
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