Reviews
of This Imaginary Woman
The Belfast Telegraph
Tuesday September 9, 2003
Amazing piece of music theatre
This Imaginary Woman, Old Museum Arts Centre
Death is no longer a taboo subject in theatre
but this highly personal and revealing piece of music theatre takes
it a step further with a strong message about the necessity of memories.
Written, composed and performed by Patrick Fitzgerald and Fern Smith,
this unique sample of experimental theatre combines Fitzgerald's musicality
with Smith's amazing theatricality to great effect.
Straight from its success at the Edinburgh Festival, the journey from
grief to acceptance following the death of a mother throws up a gamut
of emotions including sorrow, regret, anger and relief.
Against an atmospheric lighting plot, Fitzgerald's music fluctuates
between angry and sombre moods to reflect changing emotions, while Smith's
cutting, wide-ranging and ditinctive vocals demand the attention of
the audience.
When amother dies of multiple sclerosis, her daughter grieves both for
her death and for the life that her mother has suffered. Initially relieved
by the death, the daughter becomes a tortured soul who develops a macabre
obsession with death itself. Recreating in song the inner turmoil of
the mother's frustrating agony in life, the piece is almost disturbing,
so good is Smith's presentation.
For this is an exceptional performer, who uses every muscle of her being
to portray the intensity of her emotions. The voicing of memories eases
the pain of bereavement and, in one way, keeps the deceased alive in
the memory of those who loved her.
Indeed, you really should try to experience this amazing show. It will
last in the memory long after the final performance.
Damien Murray
The Scotsman
Saturday 16 August 2003
Fern Smith dons her
black sequins for an extraordinary performance.
This Imaginary Woman
Passion's triumph
Somewhere between music theatre, cabaret, song cycle, and full blown
requiem lives this remarkable piece, powerfully performed by Fern Smith
and accompanist Patrick Fitzgerald.
It is the story of a daughter coming to terms with the nasty death of
her mother, a 15-year sufferer at the devilish hands of that unstoppable
stripper of dignity, Multiple Sclerosis. Her thoughts and remembrances
become poetic snippets, alternately painfully bathetic and roaringly
furious. This is one child who is not letting their parent go gentle
into that good night.
It's a most maudlin affair, to be sure, a cabaret of pain. But so is
Winterreise. So much so that Smith gets the only laugh of the evening
as she brings in the number I Have Become a Death Bore. Obsessed with
death certainly, but not boring for one fleeting second. As you might
imagine, the show feels partly therapeutic, and only gets away with
that by being captivatingly dramatic.
And, whilst I've got the red pen out, the pair don't always win their
game battle with the Underbelly's recalcitrant acoustics. Lyrically,
too, there's some banality, and the affirming ending does feel contrived.
But that is easily made up for by Fitzgerald's score: diverse, powerfully
expressive and appealingly direct: imagine Leonard Cohen, Jacques Brel,
Stephen Sondheim and even Aaron Schonberg competing for stave space.
A bit of an indie hero, fans of Fitzgerald's Kitchens of Distinction
success d'estime outfit should storm the box office. He dances on the
half-circle of pedals, making an electronic orchestra of a simple steel
string.
And even that seems secondary to the sheer visceral blast of Smith's
performance. With a powerful, growly alto, a to-die-for black-sequinned
Betty Boop costume, and the physicality of a decathlete, she is astounding,
like a figure-skating Ute Lemper.
James Mullighan
The Western Mail
Monday 17 March 2003
A remarkable piece of theatre that draws inspiration from tragedy
We
all find ways of working through the effects of bereavement and artists
have often found inspiration in the death of loved ones. But
it's rare to have to confront the immediacy of a performer sharing her
personal crisis with us as she explores her responses to her mother's
death from multiple sclerosis.
After
all, should we not be suspicious of someone who earns a living from
pretending and now tries to convince us that this is a real person,
not a character, searching her soul in front of an audience? Not
Fern Smith of Volcano Theatre, better known for their coruscating dissection
of contemporary mores with an exciting mixture of intelligence and physicality.
She
has always been a charismatic and passionate stage presence and here
she has no problem in convincing us of her integrity as well as her
performance skills.
Indeed,
this remarkable piece of theatre, premiered at Chapter Arts Centre in
Cardiff, is clearly driven by artistic ambition as much as the need
to come to terms with bereavement. With
musician Patrick Fitzgerald, Fern Smith both meticulously exploits her
professional skills and explores new performance techniques, as if the
personal trauma has stimulated new methods of artistic enquiry as much
as caused emotional confusion. She
uses her voice, for example, to produce the strangest sounds, sounds
that express something more than simple loss or lament or pain or despair.
The
piece is performed as a series of monologues and songs and the effect
is that of a kind of postmodernist French chanson singer emerging from
an emotional maelstrom. It
is spiked with pastiche, confession with vision, memory with guilt.
Gluck,
T.S. Eliot and Shakespearean tragedy are drawn on.
It's
more than an elegy, more than in memoriam, more than an atonement for
not being present at her mother's death, but a process of coming to
terms with an emptiness and of resolution. I
found myself curiously uninvolved, a witness to rather than a participant
in a cathartic and essentially personal ritual.
A
mesmeric, uncomfortable, unique, awesome performance.
David
Adams
Theatre in Wales
Chapter Arts Centre
March 14, 2003
For an unrelenting 70 minutes, the sensational Fern Smith stalks the
stage as the howling grief-laden daughter of the imaginary mother: as
Death, as redeemer, as mother herself of the dead mother. It is a requiem
- a mass for the repose of the souls of the dead - a communion with
the dead and yet Fern Smith is extraordinarily alive. This is the key
to the piece: the tension between death and the vitality of grief and
the paradoxes legion in this relationship summed up at the end of the
piece in the paraphrase of TS Eliot's magnificently eloquent line from
the Journey of the Magi: "were we led all that way for Birth or Death…"
If eloquence can contain anger alongside beauty and despair alongside
hope then in the lapidary Smith there is eloquence abounding as she
makes statuesque stone of her sensual flesh. And there is eloquence
in the music: Velvet Underground out of Kurt Weill delivered by Patrick
Fitzgerald with a marvellous strident sensitivity (paradoxes! paradoxes!)
and Fern Smith is Patti Smith out of Lotte Lenya: sexy and sadistic.
The actress hovers in a contrived fog suspended between death and living;
between the past and the present; between wistfulness and bitterness;
between resignation and defiance. It is the fog of the aesthetic in
which all are re-born. In the stolen physicality of the mother (who
had suffered from MS) is the volcanic physicality of the performer and
in her outpouring in a remarkable, devastating closing passage in which
she is Ophelia and Lear: all the unjustly dead and those maddened by
the various grievings of familial love, every apparently small life
is honoured.
Dic Edwards
www.theatre-wales.co.uk
