Language of love spoken five ways - Quintet

The Age
Tuesday 20 July 1999 Theatre - La Mama until 1 August
Review by Helen Thompson

These five short plays by Graham Henderson take only an hour to perform. Each is a small, poetic vignette, linked by the theme of love. Henderson has written 42 plays since 1976 and published a novel, poetry and short stories.

His is not primarily a dramatic talent, yet he challenges our preconceptions about drama in an interesting way. He takes still, quiet moments, without action, conflict, or more than one or two characters, and teases them out.

The result is intriguingly intimate, the line between actor and character blurred as we are spoken to as though alone together, in a private style rather than a public space. But while the style is minimalist, the language is rich and suggestive. Metaphors, similes and adjectives are in abundance, building up the complex connotations we normally associate with poetry.

In Ithica, accompanied by the evocative sound and sight of rain on windows, a woman who has been mysteriously ill constructs a narrative of healing. She needs patience, above all, but also a certainty that she is loved, as she waits, like a Homeric woman, for the return of health.

In The Desert and the Sea, two men wait at a train station where no train stops. Sitting in the desert, eating sardines, one of them reveals that he is a merman, banished from his beloved world of water. He entices his companion into wanting to rejoin the fish people, but the land-man lacks the courage first to drown.

White, the least successful of the five plays, is a duet for two voices on the theme of white dust, the sifting down of centuries of history.

Face, performed by David Branson, who directs most of the other plays, is the most daring and successful of the plays. With one powerful light on his own face, the man constructs, at once, a meditation on the mysterious individuality and power of his face, and a joyous love story. This is theatre pared down to its very elements, and Branson gives a fine and moving performance.

The final play, Room, is a series of tiny flashes in a room strewn with bedding on which two lovers almost step out of time in their total absorption with each other. It is both intense and ordinary, a dream piece that creates a powerful and seductive mood. Its language constantly shifts the focus from the physical and sexual, to the imagined world where self has been fused with self.

This is not theatre for everyone, but it does stretch the parameters of ordinary dramatic work in a beautiful and challenging way.