By BRUCE DENNILL
A Doll’s Life / Directed by Lara Toselli / Theatre On The Square, Sandton, Johannesburg
The subtitle for this one-woman show is Confessions Of A Quarter-Life Crisis, which immediately inspires – in the mind of anyone over 35, statements, uttered in the voice of a wrinkled old crone, such as “Well, in my day, we couldn’t afford to have a crisis until the kids had left home and we’d dug a new well in the south paddock”. Happily (in terms of the piece being given early gravitas, if not for the actress playing herself on stage), the story includes a very serious announcement that absolutely does merit classification as a crisis, thus immediately side-stepping any metaphorical patting of the protagonist’s head while eye-rolling and muttering about ‘the youth of today’.
Mind you, if you wanted to pat Micaela Jade Tucker – who also wrote the script – on the head, you’d need to be quick and persistent: she’s a massively energetic, sassy performer who, even in a show with one chair as its central prop, is never really still for more than a few seconds.
The script is purposefully verbose and just as resolutely edgy, with Tucker’s vagina at the centre of pretty much all of the interlinked plot threads. Both these aspects require a sparkling confidence in the actress sharing the experiences and the processing of what happens in the story, and Tucker is definitively assured and assertive on stage, meaning that what could be uncomfortable themes – promiscuity, illness and more – are approached and dealt with an openness and accessibility that helps heighten humour and relatability rather than constantly ring alarm bells as Tucker’s (or her stage persona) questionable decisions are placed, literally, in the spotlight.
The tone of the performance very occasionally feels affected when Tucker the actress mentions the challenges writing the piece she’s currently performing or when she mentions other projects she’s worked on, but only because it threatens to pop the bubble around the experiences of Tucker the character and how the audience have been drawn into those through her full-blooded portrayal. This is more than balanced out by the play’s best moments, when Tucker completely commits to whatever emotion is valid at the time – anger, frustration, lust and others – and her consistently excellent physical comedy kicks up several notches (think John Cleese doing Angry Basil Fawlty or Will Ferrell throwing a tantrum as Ron Burgundy), inspiring regular belly laughs.
Parts of the narrative will inevitably polarise audiences as life choices the protagonist makes sometimes lead to what feel like predictable and avoidable struggles. But these philosophical conflicts do make the piece more thought-provoking than it otherwise would have been as a simple ‘A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Gynaecologist’ comedy. And Tucker’s undoubted and multi-faceted talent is given an excellent platform, with the show also bolstering the growing canon of original theatre works that unpack the intriguing and complex lives of entertainment industry professionals.
