THE PAST IS A WILD PARTY

By Diana Simmonds

July 17 2024

THE PAST IS A WILD PARTY, Siren Theatre Company at the Loading Dock Theatre, QTopia, July 10-27 2024. Photography by Alex Vaughan: all of Jules Billington

When Noëlle Janaczewska was awarded the Yale University-administered Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama in 2014 the citation declared: “Noëlle Janaczewska brings innovative stagecraft and a questioning voice to plays that translate cultural and political tensions into drama as complex as it is illuminating.” This could also describe her latest theatre work The Past Is A Wild Party.

Ostensibly a one-woman “performance essay”, the 50-minute piece actually strongly features another woman – the late-Victorian poet, essayist, proto-feminist and novelist Amy Levy. A vividly red-bound book of her poems is carried, caressed, flourished, recited from, consulted and placed at various points around the stage by the unnamed protagonist, a woman played with thrilling intensity, humour and charm by Jules Billington.

In this monologue with book and hanging light globes in squirrel cages (lighting design Benjamin Brockman), the character reveals herself as a writer who is seeking her own history and queer self through an exploration of and fervent admiration for the short life and work of one of London’s notorious “New Women”. Levy was well-educated and accomplished, she was the second Jewish woman to go to Cambridge. Among Levy’s friends were such socially incendiary figures as author and anti-war campaigner Olive Schreiner, political activist Clementina Black, academic Ellen Wordsworth Darwin, and social activist and daughter of Karl, Eleanor Marx. Levy had relationships with men and women and a great love was Vernon Lee – actually the writer Violet Paget – to whom she dedicated a poem.

This background to the red book – the unmentioned subtext to The Past Is A Wild Party – is cunningly mirrored in the passion and enthusiasm Billington’s Writer expresses as she relates her sexual awakening as a girl, teenager and young adult on the lam in a Cologne gay bar. As she seeks not only sex with another woman but also a life for her mind, and a map to her inner turmoil. She wants more – she says – so much more, as she prowls the mainly darkened stage, talking directly and intimately to the audience.

Her perambulations through history include the lugubrious yet pioneering Radclyffe Hall and her shocking sex scene which consisted of the seven words: “…and that night they were not parted…” The Writer shares her amusement, her quests, the Scrabble analogies and the letter “Q”, as well as her fascination with the lezzo pulp fiction of the 1950s, and Sappho’s fragmented poetry and Ancient Greek.

Director Kate Gaul clearly has an uncommon affinity with playwright Janaczewska’s language and preoccupations and she guides Billington and the hanging lamps with unobtrusive finesse and almost contradictory elan. The piece is also well served by an equally fine soundtrack from composer Madeleine Pickard.

Happily, this play is a rare case of less is more: there is so much to savour in The Past Is A Wild Party – including the tongue-in-cheek allusions of the title – and it’s guaranteed to intrigue and echo long after you’ve left the newly-created theatre. (Give yourself time to wander around the exhibits and artefacts of Sydney’s queer history – from the 1700s to the present day – and enjoy the exquisite irony of a sparkling new museum of gays, poofters, dykes and tranies being housed in the very building in which Darlo’s nastiest used to incarcerate them.)

Meanwhile, The Past Is A Wild Party is deceptive, beautiful, funny, and illuminating. Don’t miss it!