With Simon Stone’s STRANGE INTERLUDE, after Eugene O’Neill’s 1928 play, we are in similar territory to German playwright Botho Strauss’s play GROSS UND KLEIN, recently produced by the Sydney Theatre Company, and starring, in the leading role, Cate Blanchett as Lotte. Both Lotte, and in Stone’s play Nina, are turbulent, alienated young women, striving to find some peace and comfort in their worlds.
In STRANGE INTERLUDE, attractive, feisty, strong willed twenty-year-old Nina Leeds (Emily Barclay) has a great fall. She loses the love of her life, Gordon Shaw (Akos Armont), in the first World War. Picking up the pieces from this trauma she struggles to get her life back together again, but obstacles keep on getting in her way.
Nina has no problems luring men. Men are drawn to her. She hooks up with adman Sam whom she marries. Her Doctor friend Ned tells her the answer for her is to get pregnant.
She gets pregnant and her mother-in-law explosively informs her that there is paternal hereditary madness. Nina retaliates with “I’m not a fucking heifer!” so she decides to go ahead and have an abortion. Later Ned impregnates her in the shower, with she makes a pact with Ned that she will say the baby is Sam’s. ‘What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive’!
STRANGE INTERLUDE is a deeply felt, passionate and at times, surreal play. The cast give strong performances. Emily Barclay gives a convincing performance in the lead role. The three men who she twirls around her finger, her Uncle Charles Marsden, in an affectionate term, is played wonderfully by Mitchell Butel. Toby Truslove gives a good performance as her cunning yet boorish husband, Sam, and Toby Schmitz plays her sophisticated Doctor friend, Ned.
Robert Cousin’s all iridescent white set, giving the sense of infinite space, and thirteen beaming strobe lights, give the dialogue an ethereal resonance.
Simon Stone’s production of STRANGE INTERLUDE opened at the upstairs theatre, Belvoir Street theatre on Wednesday 9th May and plays until Sunday 17th June, 2012.
(c) David Kary
24th May, 2012
Tags: Sydney Theatre Reviews- STRANGE INTERLUDE, Simon Stone, Eugene O’Neill, Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney Arts Guide, David Kary