Photo: Daniel Boud
Sarah Pierse has absolutely nailed the role of Miss Docker in this wonderful production of Patrick White’s A Cheery Soul directed by Kip Williams. As well as being a visual delight (thanks Elizabeth Gadsby and costume designer Alice Babidge), Williams has assembled a fabulous ensemble, all of whom (with the exception of Pierse) play multiple characters and play them terrifically.
This is un unabridged version of White’s original, replete with Shakespearian, Beckettian and musical theatre references. As well as his Greek Choruses, which are amongst the most memorable of many memorable scenes, Williams also makes good use of video to give us close-ups of the characters’ faces, enabling us to attempt to read their thoughts and emotions as we skip between surrealist dreams and suburban nightmares.
A Cheery Soul is set in 1950s Australia, in White’s fictional suburb Sarsaparilla, where the horror of a world war is just past and the threat of a nuclear war ever present. This is a time of neat appearances, repressed emotions and a façade of tidy living, a time (such short while ago!) when gender dictated your career choices (or lack thereof). It is also a biting satire, questioning the meaning of morality, mortality and the need for belonging. The milk of human kindness is largely wanting in this 1950s suburb (has much changed?), although Mrs Custance did try.
Jay James Moody, Bruce Spence, Tara Morice and Emma Harvie in STC production of A Cheery Soul. Photo: Daniel Boud
We begin with Anita Hegh, pristine in apricot sateen underneath her pinny, as the non-complaining housewife Mrs Custance, and Anthony Taufa as her respectable, staid and tomato-growing bank teller hubby. Their world is orderly, childless (not by choice) and short on sexual frustration (the tension of sexual repression is laced throughout A Cheery Soul, it’s part of its fabric, with comic, sad and poignant resonances).
Enter Miss Docker, who has – somewhat miguidedly – been invited to lodge with the Custances. Miss Docker, as anyone familiar with this tale will know, is a woman with no social boundaries; she is a whirlwind of opinion that she is willing to share with anyone within range and a keeper of the Christian faith. Her aggressive if well-meaning personality makes her a figure of fun, an outcast, the ultimate outsider.
She soon outlives her welcome. Cast out from the bright and plastic interiors of the Custances’ suburban dream house, we follow her to Sundown Home for Old People, and enter a darker space where the inmates are shuffling closer to death – but not before Miss Docker’s bombastic ways disrupt their dusty existence.
If there were hints of the surreal in the super-bright green and red of Mr Custance’s tomato plants, they are as nothing to what follows. The blackness of Gadsby’s set highlights the colours, and Nick Schlieper’s clever lighting – which ranges from subtle to operating theatre whiteness – gives us tableaux that could have been snipped from an 18th century Old Masters painting to nightmarish brittleness.
We flashback to a funeral procession at which Miss Docker is royally abandoned by all the other mourners. In these scenes, which make full use of the Drama Theatre’s revolves, video and a rather magnificent old car, Tara Morice shines as the widowed, once wealthy (“who would have thought one would end up living under corrugated iron”) Millicent Lillie.
Shari Sebbens and Sarah Peirse who nails the lead role of Miss Docker. Photo: Daniel Boud
Enter the Greek Chorus again, showcasing the combined talents of the ladies of the nursing home dressed in widows’ weeds and animal-fur stoles as they dissect and mutter about death and dying.
These ladies (who include the very properly dressed Bruce Spence and Taufa) are never more arresting and funny than in the ‘rites of Spring’ sequence that opens Act 2, yet another visually spectacular moment.
There is no doubting Miss Docker is awful, or that she has a “militant virtue”. Her “goodness is a disease” opines the Reverend Wakeman, who is the recipient of a handknitted balaclava as well as her advice on how to write his sermons and mow his lawn. Brandon McClelland is superb in the role of the tongue-tied reverend who can barely cope with Miss Docker, let alone a sexual relationship with his would-be passionate wife (Nikki Shiels). It is difficult not to individually praise the entire cast – not mentioned thus far are Emma Harvie, Jay James-Moody, Monica Sayers and Shari Sebbens – because they all play their parts (and as mentioned before these are multiple) to perfection.
In the demanding lead role, Peirse never flags. “I’m a truth-teller,” she declares, but she never sees the truth of her own situation. Or perhaps she does. Her relentless cheerfulness could be a way to keep truth at bay. Towards the end of the play, she states she is an orphan, and laughs. It is overwhelmingly sad; she has always been alone, always looking for love and company. Always ignored.
Miss Docker is annoying, bombastic and alienating – and if she was on your bus, you’d do your best to ignore her. Everyone tries to ignore her. It’s only children innocently parroting their parents’ harsh opinions that tell her how she is seen. Even a stray dog will have nothing to do with her, except piss on her leg.
This is White’s horror of suburbia and isolation writ large, and lit brightly, and played to perfection.
The Sydney Theatre Company production of Patrick White’s A Cheery Soul plays at the Drama Theatre, Opera House until December 15.
