by Patrick White. Holden Street Theatres Inc. Holden Street Theatre Studio. 26 Sep 2024
When one leaves the theatre, Miss Docker comes too.
Miss Docker is one of theatre’s most complex and compelling anti-heroes.
She is arguably the greatest character in the greatest play by Australia’s Nobel Laureate writer, Patrick White.
And, while she was created out of the very Sydney-like, working-class culture of the 1950s in White’s fictitious Sarsaparilla, she’s a timeless personality - a suburban do-good monster. Perchance we all have met her ilk.
She also is a challenging stage role to be captured only by the finest of mid-life actresses.
Hence, the utter serendipity of having Martha Lott in this city.
We cannot celebrate her too much. We may dare to call her a “great” actress.
And, we have Peter Goers who seizes that greatness and casts her in those elite and memorable roles, among them, Tallulah Bankhead in Looped and Noel Coward’s Lady Gilpin. Now White’s Miss Docker.
And so it comes to pass that, laden with emotion and fermenting with thought, we audience members leave Holden Street yet again with the knowledge that we have experienced something exceptional.
This latest production of the uncommonly presented tragicomedy, A Cheery Soul, is a triumph. Five stars and then some.
And, on a shoestring budget, too.
Not that everyone can swiftly rave about it. It is not an easy play. It has more shades than its vivid walls of patchwork crochet granny rugs.
It opens as a nice local couple takes pity on Miss Docker and offers to take her in, only to realise that there is more to her than her facade of indefatigable good cheer. She’s a busybody who takes brazen liberties in the belief that it is always for the good of others. She’s the village clown, a status reflected in Lott’s quasi grotesque whiteface makeup. Her meddlesome nature eventually alienates her everywhere. Fellow inhabitants in an old-folks home shun her and, as for the hapless minister of the local church…
Martha Lott portrays not only the brash optimism but also, intensely poignantly, the so-carefully-suppressed vulnerability of Miss Docker. One's heart breaks for this despicable character. She’s ghastly and utterly compelling. It’s a tour de force performance.
Around her is a glorious cast. Catherine Campbell captures the essence of marital complacency as the well-intended Mrs Custance. Nuanced to a well-observed core, she's a symphony of smug suburbia. Brava. Robert Cuszena shows his seasoned stage skills in artfully complementing as her malleable spouse. Perched beneath a crochet rug on two chairs in a bedroom scene, they are the purest picture of a happy marriage.
While Sandi McMenamin brings the house down as the world-weary organist, she touches the heart as an old girl in the nursing home. David O’Brien makes a committed performance as a stroke victim and Amelia Lott-Watson has a delicious comic presence as the teenage Narelle. Christopher Cordeaux expressively adorns the stage as a useful extra as does dear Ron Hoenig.
David Arcidiaco is, oh, so winning as the self-doubting minister Mr Wakeman. There’s a lost soul in his eyes. While Jessica Corrie as the minister’s wife throws a cold balance of common sense into the dramas, it is Sue Wylie and Jo Coventry who brilliantly equip this Patrick White play with the essence of Patrick White. As residents of the old folks home, they perform as the chorus, their blended voices underscoring their, our, and Sarsaparilla's inner world. Their lines are a joy of pure White prose, prosaic and profound all at once. For, indeed, A Cheery Soul was not written as a piece of realistic theatre. It ventured into the absurd and the surreal, the symbolic and the banal.
Director Peter Goers shares his understanding of all of this in the detail and finesse embraced by this exceptional production. Patrick White would have cause to be proud.
Samela Harris
When: 26 Sep to 12 Oct
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com
Disclaimer: Samela worked with Goers on his now lamentably lost Sunday radio arts show.
