TARANTULA
TARANTULA, Tredwood Productions at the King Street Theatre, 10 October-3 November 2012. Photos by Patrick Boland.
ALANA Valentine is a prolific playwright and this new play has to be one of her best. Known for her community-based and non-fiction work (Parramatta Girls, Run Rabbit Run, Head Full of Love for instance and most recently) Tarantula is something else again.
In the Valentine pipeline for some years, Tarantula is a skilfully constructed and beautifully realised play within a play within a story within a relationship. Gina (Zoe Carides) is an actress whose interest in Lola Montez is both personal and professional. She has devised a play about the legendary Irish-born "Spanish" dancer-adventurer-courtesan-fabulist and the play within a play is set in the rehearsal room.
Gina has cast Terry (Michael Whalley) as Lola's younger lover Folland and much of the early action revolves around the two running scenes, discussing motivation, characterisation and so on. Woven into the play is the uneasy real-life relationship between the actors - who are also employer and employee and young man, older woman. The spiky results of these layered encounters between the two are frequently very funny and the opening night audience at King Street was highly appreciative of the invitation to laugh.
Gina's motives for choosing to explore the Montez story are gradually revealed as Terry goes from quick change to quick change to take on the other characters in Lola's tempestuous tour of the Australian goldfields in the 1860s. In reality, when Lola and Folland finally left Australia, bound for America, he mysteriously disappeared at sea, never to be seen again. Gina wants to know why and how. The dramatised-rehearsed telling of their time in Australia (so bizarre it has to be true, and apparently is) leads to some interesting and plausible possibilities.
What also comes out of this playing - and they do play, to great comic effect - is a rich exploration of the connections between men and women; and the disconnects when one is a young man and the other is an older woman. Stereotyping, sexism and ageism are all chewed over in depth by both Gina and Terry from their polar opposite standpoints. Opening during the week when Australian male attitudes towards women have been in the news as never before (at least since the 1970s anyway) it's fascinating to see how the play has caught the surging wave of the zeitgeist. And Whalley and Carides ride it for all it's worth.
On an abstract set of simple hanging panels (Sarah-Jane McAllan design, Marcus Cook lighting) director Nastassja Djalog has made a clear and vivacious production out of a play that would be perilously complex with less accomplished treatment. The two actors are captivating and with Julia Cotton's choreography of Lola's famously lousy dance skills, cellist Richard Mills weaving in John Encarnacao's incidental music from the sidelines, Tarantula is yet another fine new Australian play to add to the list for 2012.
And if you want to know how a hairy black spider, a Spanish dance and 21st century female sexuality and poetry are all bound up in the same journey to reach a surprising and dramatic conclusion - you'll have to go see the play. But you should go see it anyway for 90 minutes of moving, funny, sad and sexy storytelling. Recommended.
