In American playwright Julia Cho’s play ‘The Piano Teacher’ we are invited into the cosy, old worldly home of Mrs K, an elderly retired piano teacher. We are her guests because she wants to tell us about her life.

The evening starts off convivially with Mrs K getting out of her plush armchair, taking cookies from her favourite cookie jar, and handing them out to the audience.

Mrs K’s stories begin to pour out of her. She talks about her long marriage to Mr K, a holocaust survivor, who passed away a few years previously. She describes her first meeting with her future husband, ‘He looked at me in such a way, like he was dying of thirst and I was the rain. I don’t know if I fell in love with him at that moment but I certainly fell in love with that feeling a little. I liked feeling like rain’.

And then she speaks passionately about her career working as a piano teacher. This was her life for thirty years and her memories are all positive except for a final concert recital that her students gave for her that she could only describe as like a train wreck.

Whilst rummaging through her papers Mrs K finds an old phone book with the numbers of former students. Feeling lonely and nostalgic, she decides to ring a few of her old students to find out how they’re going. It is a decision that she will later regret. She ends up meeting a few of her former students, and whilst her memories of those times are pure, her student’s memories are tainted.

‘The Piano Teacher’ is an engrossing play with broad, sweeping themes. The play looks at the large gap that can take place between how a person remembers life and the reality of how things have been. Cho’s play looks at the fragile world that children dwell in, that the playwright poetically describes, ‘Children are pure imagination walking around in skin’. And, on a darker note, ‘The Piano Teacher’ looks at how negatively, damaged people can effect those around them.

‘The Piano Teacher’ is presented as a theatre/ dinner show with Mrs K’s guests seated at candle-lit dinner tables and served platters of anti-pasta and wine. (Before the show proper, a pianist and singer get the audience in the mood performing some ballads). The set comprised two stage areas; Mrs K’s living room, a little run-down but still featuring her beloved piano, and the living room of Mary Fields, one of the students whom Mrs K catches up with.

With a fine ambience, Lisa Eismen’s sensitive direction, and focused performances by the cast, with Marilyn Gotlieb playing Mrs K, and Nick Dale and Karina Bracken playing two of her former students, Michael and Mary Fields, ‘The Piano Teacher’ stands out as a well crafted and touching night at the theatre.

Dinner with a View’s production of Julia Cho’s ‘The Piano Teacher’, the play’s Australian premiere, opened at the Tap Gallery on Thursday 4th November, 2010 and plays until Friday 12th November, 2010.