Thursday March 28, 2024
Hilda
Review

Hilda

September 18 2007

Hilda, TAP Gallery, Palmer Street, Darlinghurst; September 5-20; www.mca-tix.com or 1 300 306 776

Actor-producer Susie Lindeman has introduced award-winning French-Senegalese writer Marie Ndiaye to Australian audiences through her translation of Ndiaye's 1999 play, Hilda and as co-producer and star of this production at TAP Gallery; and she ought to be applauded for her passion and dedication. Hilda is a wonderful work of political and textual complexity and should be seen by a wide audience.

Hilda started out on radio in France, however it was adapted for theatre and is now a very good 90 minute one-act stage play in English. With Lindeman's tour de force central performance of what is virtually a semi-monologue with supporting actors, it makes compelling theatre.

The play works on several levels. On the surface it is a black comedy whose central character is Madame Lemarchand (Lindeman), a seemingly nice bourgeois lady who is looking for help to relieve her of the onerous duties associated with being well off and idle. Enter Franck (Jake Blundell) a young handyman whose wife - the unseen Hilda - turns out to be Madame Lemarchand's actual object of desire.

Even as the audience chuckles at Mme Lemarchand's outrageous demands (of course Hilda must come and look after her and her children, she needs her far more urgently than does Franck; and the couple's own children can go to nursery school - she will arrange it) the play at first imperceptibly then inexorably descends into a horror story. Although Franck (and the audience) really can't believe Mme Lemarchand is serious, by the time her implacable will becomes apparent and is taken seriously, it is too late.

Mme Lemarchand swings back and forth from loving, poignant and pitifully lonely to a bullying, unreasonable tyrant. She is also manipulative and wily: she advances money to Franck when he is injured and then announces it will mean Hilda can no longer come home and will actually have to work longer than contracted - to pay off the debt.

Hilda

The realisation that Hilda is actually an electrifying political allegory should dawn at about the same moment the thought strikes: hang on a minute, isn't this what the IMF does all over Africa? And the answer is - yes, it is, on both counts. Even when Mme Lemarchand says, plaintively "I cant do joy. Hilda will have to do joy," she is not simply talking about a little bit of comforting emotion. The employer wants to own her servant and feed off her servant at the most profound level.

The underlying (but bedrock) theme is not one that would be immediately apparent to a comfortable and relaxed Sydneysider, but even if this element is missed, the superficial story is rivetting. As Franck (and the invisible Hilda) battle the ebbs and flows of Mme Lemarchand's reason and insanity the laughter dies away and a sensation not unlike drowning begins to make itself felt.

Directed by Jonathan Wald with an easy sense of rhythm that avoids melodrama and therefore maintains the credibility and awfulness on a set of improbable tattered grandeur (Jewell Johnson, lit by Larry Kelly); Susie Lindeman delivers a remarkable, sustained performance - at once magnetic and repellent and awfully plausible. "What about ME, Franck?" she rages in one of the most truthful moments of bourgeois/colonial angst.

You can hear an interview with Hilda director Jonathan Wald on episode 42 of Stagecast.

 

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