The premise for Flippin’ Norah is good. Billed as an EveryWoman story, the idea is to revisit Norah’s adult life in the wake of her death. It began as a devised entry in the PlayFest 2016 48-hour play competition, won the Best Ensemble award in the finals – “there was much enthusiasm about the concept from the PlayFest organisers, judges and other professionals involved” – and building on that encouragement it has been developed into 45 minute piece, written by the ‘Scene It’ Theatre Group and directed by Deborah Rea.

What holds our interest most is trying to work out who is being whom as the all-too-common story plays out through its various stages. The story elements are not exactly surprising or gripping, nevertheless a warning that what follows may include spoilers may be appropriate.

It takes a while to register that the young woman in white with a hippie head band, who enters to Jimi Hendrix guitar riffs, is Young Nora (Lauren O’Hara), observing the action ‘in spirit’ as her three daughters – Annette Cochran, Susan Holt and Shirley Domb – pick over her few belongings. She pitches in with the odd comment that the daughters ignore. A neighbour (Sue Reeves) returns a Tupperware item. Nora’s era, as a Baby Boomer and would-be participant in the socio-sexual revolution, has been well researched.

The revelation that Jane (the oldest) was the reason Nora and Jeff got married is the catalyst for revisiting the whole sorry saga: her bright-eyed trip to Sydney, en-route to the USA, cut short in Kings Cross by getting pregnant to Jeff; returning to NZ for the obligatory wedding; Jeff turning out to be a lazy bludger; the birth …

As the scenes play out, with each of the older actresses taking a turn at being Nora, her young self, in hindsight, tries to intervene, as if there is a possibility she could change the inevitable course of herstory. This is an odd dramatic convention as it’s clear she has no agency in affecting to action. Although O’Hara is entirely convincing in the role, her bleating becomes singularly undramatic.

I can’t help wishing we had seen O’Hara playing the young, idealistic, optimistic then thwarted Nora, and only over the decades that followed seen her trapped young-twenties ‘soul’ commenting on the degradation that followed, from a ‘parallel universe’ perhaps.

As it stands, however, the portrait of Nora’s life is so two-dimensional it renders the drama bland. And Jeff – who wears a leather bushman’s cap and has his back to us all the time (played by Susan Holt, I think) – is little more than a one-dimensional character. No human being is that simplistic.

Thought has clearly gone into who the daughters are now, by comparison, with hints coming out in the arguments they have over whether Nora had a happy life or not, but none of that is developed either. The potential for each daughter to recall significant moments in her relationship with her mother, thereby fleshing out both characters, is not explored.  

I can’t help but ponder that in the realm of EveryWoman truisms, a woman’s relationship with her mother invariably changes when she becomes a mother herself; the parents as grandparents invariably seem to love their grandchildren more and/or treat them more indulgently than they did their own children … And there is always a point where a child realises their parents were people before they were parents. Sometimes that revelation only comes out after a parent dies, when people turn up at the funeral, mementos are discovered, secrets are revealed or truths that have been hiding in plain sight become visible to younger generations.  

Well explored, through a revealing range of authentic emotional states, such territory can become absorbing drama that transcends cliché. Unfortunately Flippin’ Nora gets nowhere near realising such potential: it remains a good idea in search of a playwright (or a group with the skills of a playwright). 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer