Perth Theatre
Five stars
Ancient voices seem to rumble through the fields at
the opening of Perth Theatre’s revival of David Harrower’s astonishing play.
First seen in 1995, on the face of it, it is a dark tale of a peasant woman’s
awakening – to language, to her own sexuality and to the fire of life she slowly
learns to articulate. While almost taking a leap into gothic thriller
territory, in Lu Kemp’s starkly brooding and quasi ritualistic looking production,
the play becomes a thing of transcendent beauty.
Set in an un-named ancient landscape among the
monumental greyness of much reviled miller Gilbert Horn’s work-place, into this
world steps Jessica Hardwick’s Young Woman. Wide-eyed and still barely literate
on the back of her marriage to ploughman Pony William, she is possessed with a ferocious
but still untapped intelligence and a primal hunger for knowledge.
Out of this pours a raw mix of brutal sensuality that
reeks of the animalistic harshness of a daily grind based on subjugation and
secret desire. Harrower’s near mono-syllabic dialogue is shot through with a
physicality that puts muscle and guts onto its poetry. The vastness of Jamie
Vartan’s set allows Hardwick to look up to the still nameless skies, while Luke
Sutherland’s sound design seems to quake, as if the stones themselves are
telling tales.
As Pony William and Gilbert Horn, Rhys Rusbatch and
Michael Moreland apply different shades of steely machismo to their polar
opposites. Torn between them, Hardwick embodies the Young Woman with a
fearlessness that seems to come from the earth itself. In finding her voice and
learning to give meaning to the world around her with every heartfelt glance,
she shows how knowledge can be both liberating and dangerous in the most magnificent
of emancipations.
The Herald, February 5th 2018
ends
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