An Unfortunate Woman .


Saturday 18th March


This was a surprise performance. I hadn’t really heard anything about it but the flyer caught my attention. The actor in the picture, Nicola Gunn, looked interesting, animated and mischievous. It was a matinee performance and not very busy. The start was delayed slightly and a woman in the queue was becoming very annoyed, saying that there was no excuse for lateness. I wondered what it was that was so important for her to be this upset at a ten minute delay.

The Promethean Theatre was a quaint old place with vinyl chairs and wooden armrests, and the stage was bare except for a chair. The sole performer entered via the rear door, in character as a simple minded clerk from the Registry of Births and Deaths. She was carrying an old fashioned suitcase and looking around her full of wonder and very happy. Once on stage she became another character, a psychiatrist, who sat down and read a letter, then climbed on a chair to hang himself. Confused? Yes, me too, but here the action went into rewind mode and we began to understand how this scene came about.

The mine in this performance was so skilfully performed that I could ‘see’ the objects being manipulated. I understood that the bread was pushed down into the toaster, then popped up and made the character jump, ever so slightly so as hardly to be noticeable, but enough to make me believe. When the housekeeper climbed the stairs it looked so real I could hardly believe that there were no stairs there. The miming skills of this performer were better than any I had seen before. She told the story with very little dialogue and only a chair and a suitcase. I marvelled afterwards at how I had understood what I had seen through mime and very little else.

The story told the tale of a young boy, Hubert, adored by his father Henry yet resented by his mother Clara. As the story unfolds we discovered that he was born as a result of Clara having had an affair. Henry was unaware of this and loved him as his own. We were shown flashbacks of events in Hubert’s childhood where his father had supported him but his mother had not. We eventually found out that Henry had taken him ice skating as a child and had fallen through the ice and drowned. Clara openly blamed the boy for this and he carried this blame throughout his whole life. Clara refuses to accept her husband was dead and lived for 42 years believing him still to be living with her. On receiving an invitation from Clara, inviting him to a party, at his ‘father’s’ request only as she thinks he ‘always ruins everything’, Hubert committed suicide. Hubert’s wife had just left him and the invitation was the last straw.

The integrated tale of a clerk, Stanley, in the Births and Deaths Registry concluded with him realising there was more to life than work and finally taking a holiday, which took the audience back to where the performance began.

The whole performance was very complex, but expertly told through mime. The lighting was used effectively to help us distinguish the scene changes, and particularly so during the climax where the action jumped between Stanley’s new positive life direction and Hubert’s desperate tragic final act. Nicola’s facial expressions were beautifully exaggerated to leave no doubt how the characters were feeling and what message they were trying to deliver. Her use of voice, albeit minimal, was clear and precise, with fantastic use of tone, pitch and volume to develop the characters into believable people.