COLDER THAN HERE
COLDER THAN HERE, Ensemble Theatre, 16 September - 12 October 2024. Photography by Phil Erbacher: above - Huw Higginson and Airlie Dodds; below - Hannah Waterman and Airlie Dodds; below again - Charlotte Friels
English playwright Laura Wade is best known, in Australia at least, for the comedy Home, I’m Darling (STC 2021) in which Johnny and Judy turned their backs on the present to live in their version of the 1950s. Somewhat like The Truman Show, they discovered their idyll was, like so much nostalgia and sentimentality, not much chop. However, the playwright delivered an even more sardonically clear-eyed approach to life, death, and the whole damn thing fifteen years earlier with 2005’s Colder Than Here.
It begins with discovering that Myra (Hannah Waterman) has bone cancer and six months to live. It’s not a revelation one would normally associate with comedy, yet the Ensemble’s opening night audience was chortling when not outright guffawing. Some of it might have been the shock of the utterly unexpected: “You have to find things to do when you’re off work dying,” Myra explains of the PowerPoint presentation she’s devised to organise her death. But most laughter is because Wade has a wicked sense of humour and an unusually frank way of mentioning the unmentionable.
For those who prefer to say they “lost” Aunty, or that Mum has “passed” or “is at rest”, Wade’s approach to Myra shuffling off this mortal coil – which she begins to do as her cancer becomes ever more painful – Colder Than Here will be an enlivening bucket of ice-cold reality.
Myra has no time for euphemisms – she has very little time for anything – and she must bring along on this unwelcome journey her husband Alec (Huw Higginson), and their daughters, Jenna (Airlie Dodds), and Harriet (Charlotte Friels). In their individual ways they are each in denial: Alec can’t cope with the upwelling of emotions in his women and himself; Jenna can’t admit to bulimia and terrible taste in men, while Harriet won’t admit to anything other than maintaining a stiff upper lip. Meanwhile, beneath the nice middle-class surface, all sorts of conflicting feelings are bubbling up.
With a director less sure and light-handed than Janine Watson Colder Than Here could tip into mawkishness on the one hand, or grimness on the other. As it is, the 90-minute work is unpredictably comical until it isn’t, by which time it’s simply absorbing and finally, tenderly moving. The actors are at the top of their games. Real-life husband and wife Higginson and Waterman achieve a remarkable passage from the frozen distance of years of separate bedrooms to a thawing reconciliation that turns into real warmth. From very different standpoints, Dodds and Friels make their own inner and outer treks until the sisters can finally bask in long absent empathy and acceptance.
The play was Wade’s third or fourth, written when she was just 28, and her first big-time success. It’s remarkable in a quiet way as Myra tries out various possibilities including a cardboard coffin and where to be buried. She manages to enlist her offspring’s help in scouting rural locations. For this, video designer Mark Bolotin floods the back wall with different woodland prospects, while the mottled green carpet of the family living room is part of the pastoral effect wrought by Michael Hankin’s set. Morgan Moroney’s lighting ties both together and enhances the changing circumstances. Bird song and incidental music by Jessica Dunn, and unobtrusively apposite costumes by Genevieve Graham complete a terrific creative team effort.
Meanwhile, the second half slyly slips into both seriousness and drollery as the family negotiates the unthinkable yet also has to deal with everyday anxieties. The cat disappears. The heating goes on the blink. The house is freezing. The repairman is hopeless. And all the time the physical and psychic chills do U-turns for each character and situation. The four actors make it all look natural and easy when it is not. It’s an exceptional production of an unsettling, profound comedy. After the laughter, tears are appropriate. Recommended without reservation.
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