The Miracle of Cookie's Table
The Miracle of Cookie's Table, Griffin Theatre Company at SBW Stables Theatre; August 17-September 22, 2007; ph: MCA Ticketing 1300 306 776 or www.griffintheatre.com.au
Let's not delay another minute: the first miracle of Cookie's table is Leah Purcell. She is an actress whose personal charm, considerable stagecraft and willingness to find the dark centre of a character and courageously bring her to life, can inspire audiences to take her figuratively proffered hand and go with her wherever she decides to lead. Her performance as the damaged but defiant Annie is one of the finest, funniest, most provoking and touching that Sydney has seen this year.
The second miracle is a script - by Wesley Enoch - which, although still ragged around the seams and segues, is a compelling and unusual story of mother, son, place and times. The Story of the Miracles at Cookie's Table won the 2005 STC/SMH Patrick White Playwrights' Award and was taken up by HotHouse Theatre's "Month in the Country" residential program funded by Arts NSW and Albury City Council. It gave the writer time to put in further work on the play before its staging at Griffin.
The result is a work which has many of the elements of traditional storytelling - addressing the audience, stopping the action to introduce a different viewpoint, for instance - as well as incorporating the theatrical convention of simultaneous multiple generations (grandmother, mother, adult son and child son). It works well to gradually unravel and reveal the silences and secrets which connect and separate Annie from her mother (Cookie - Roxanne McDonald) and her son Nathan (Russell Smith).
Cookie's table is the centrepiece of the stage and the action. A magnificent rough-hewn piece of furniture around which the family has cooked, eaten, drunk, fought, loved, laughed and wept since its fashioning from a great tree taken by timber-cutters in the 1870s. The tree was no ordinary bit of old-growth timber, but Cookie's "birth tree", in whose shade she had been born and whose cutting was akin to excising a piece of herself. The distraught Cookie - so named for the job she took on in the white man's big house - had followed the scrape in the ground made by the dragged tree and retrieved a slab cut from it at the mill. The table is her spirit - and has become a family heirloom and place of record. The names of all her daughters are carved into its underside and, upon her death, is the subject of a fierce battle between Annie and Nathan.
Cell phone wielding highflying executive Nathan, home to the island only briefly for his beloved grandmother's funeral, is appalled and fascinated by his mother. Annie is a one-time singer and all-time lost soul who is also appalled and fascinated - by her son's disclosure that he's gay. (The scene where mother and son spar over a bottle of Jack Daniels and Annie's prejudice is wonderfully funny as well as terribly sad.) The journeys these two undertake during the course of the play are gripping and unpredictable, offering much food for thought and to savour.
Marion Potts directs with a seemingly orchestral sense of rhythm and nuance and draws sweet performances from her cast. They comfortably inhabit Bruce McKinven's set - the huge yet benign slab table backed by stylised timber slabs lit to resemble a primeval forest or fire lit kitchen by Luiz Pampolha. Sound designer/composer Brett Collery also adds a further level of atmosphere and meaning to a production which, despite some textual flaws, is a wonderfully unusual piece of storytelling-drama.
Common gossip is that it is autobiographical - not so, says the playwright who deliberately sets the action on an island - not Straddie - and has drawn on stories he has been told of the birth tree. (A story that goes throughout the islands to the north of Australia, including and as far as the Moluccas.) It remains to be said, again, that Leah Purcell is the blazing, beating, bleeding, laughing heart of the production. She is something else, that girl. Something else.
