By BRUCE DENNILL
My Brilliant Divorce / Directed by Alan Committie / Pieter Toerien’s Montecasino Theatre, Fourways, Johannesburg
It’s fitting that a script that explores the developing effects of loneliness after the breakdown of a relationship involves only one performer. This does mean that all of the perspectives offered are only from one side, but there is still more than enough experienced in that space to fill a story that anyone who has loved and lost can relate to. Geraldine Aron’s script arguably adds more examples of pain and droll ways of dealing with it than are needed from an artistic point of view, but a brilliant performer can make the length of the play less of an issue and more of a bonus, and Kate Normington achieves the right balance, using a range of talents to do so.
The setting for the entire piece is one room – the lounge that Angela Kennedy Lipsky (Normington) shared with her husband Max until recently. Now, her only companion is their dog Axel (a realistic-looking stuffed toy version of some sort of terrier), who lies silently in a basket by the couch.
A couple of simple, clever effects mark the passing of time (the annual Guy Fawkes fireworks display is seen through a “window” at the back of the stage; marking off another year) and whenever someone who was in the house leaves (a recording of loud footsteps and the slamming of a door). The former underlines one serious subject-related thread – that a divorce, however “brilliant”, is a drawn-out time- and life-consuming event. And the latter has a surprisingly emotional effect as, even if the person leaving the house has already left the relationship in the larger scheme of things, each exit is a fresh stab wound in the potential for what could have been.
Initially, the script seems to suggest something superficial but giggle-worthy in the same way that water cooler chitchat can occasionally provide a diversion, but it’s soon clear that, below the verbosity and goofiness of the character, Angela is a woman – with her own flaws, eccentricities and dilemmas – whose hurt and confusion will morph and flow as the play proceeds, always processed through a filter of humour that might be rather more robust than her self-image.
This is a role custom-made for Normington. She has a knack for combining physical theatre with comic timing, using facial expressions, posture and movement (within a lit square on the stage that keeps things compact) to give the material punchiness and the punchlines material weight. She also gets to showcase a range of accents and speaking styles, all of them riotously spot-on and immediately recognisable whenever the actress returns to the minor character – her mother, a doctor, a misogynistic lawyer and more – to which the accent is attached.
The storyline is slightly uneven, with more extended threads like Angela’s hypochondria delivering laughs again and again but the occasional one-off gag falling relatively flat. But there is enough in the script to keep things rolling, and Normington’s energy (and how it lifts and wavers according to the character’s emotional state) plus Alan Committie’s comedy-literate direction mean that there is plenty of vigour throughout the 90 minutes-plus-interval running time.
And throughout, the unwilling accessibility – being able to connect with some parts of the journey of a woman facing a world she doesn’t understand or really want to be a part of, even if her past was far from perfect – keeps any vaguely sensitive or sensible audience member locked in. Angela should not necessarily be anyone’s role model, but the tragicomic outcome of her experience makes a tough topic thoroughly entertaining to explore.
