One moment that could have been improved was the moment where the younger prostitute enters and exits the space frequently. The lights come up on a girl (Vala Fannell) in a brothel missing her old sweetheart she looked the part of the dying prostitute with greasy hair and a pallid face, and was a key performer in my eyes. The second short play, Hello From Bertha, was the most interesting. Considering both theatre groups have a large amount of actors from Scandinavia, it would have actually been more effective in their normal accents.
Onto the performances themselves…The accents fluctuated between Russian, Australian and stereotypical southern American. The jazz they were playing was very reminiscent of the 1920s which, to me, is an anachronism – I don’t know if they were trying to just simplify the whole thing but it just felt a bit lazy. There’s a lot of differentiation in these plays and there isn’t any sort of recognition of that in the production itself. The play is said to be set in the 1940s, but both A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot and Hello From Bertha were published in the late 1950s and Portrait of a Madonna was published in 1946…and this isn’t even mentioning the times the plays were set in. The play’s title, taken from the Tennessee Williams quote “A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages”, promised three short plays about women being constrained and having to do what they can in order to survive…but the content itself actually didn’t show this, which wasn’t stellar. Even before we entered the performance space, I encountered a cute little typewriter pre-set in the bar – using the hashtag #wildatheart, it easily blended the modern with the antiquated. Tucked away in Zone 3, we arrived to atmospheric lighting and a speakeasy-vibe in a very modern arts centre. My boyfriend turns to look at me, giving me a look that says ‘where the hell are we going?’, and I have to agree.
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