We’ve all suffered those prolonged, unbearable moments as we wait for a loved one to return home. Where does the mind wander?  

Here, four family members enact, then continually re-enact, that pre-lunch limbo waiting for their ‘young woman of thirty-five’ to arrive from the airport. In each reworking of the one initial script, a character takes us into their own fantasy, so traversing numerous eventualities. These fantasies are at times perverse, familiar, absurd or vengeful, but always delivered with the cast’s high energy and brilliant slapstick touches.

What would happen if we revealed our inner lives directly to each other?

Alice, the mother (Terry MacTavish), reveals an ongoing affair; Brian, the grumpy father (Bruno Willis), confesses – eventually with relish – that he desires to eat himself; Maisie, the awaited girl’s aunt (Ellie Swann) first expounds about platypuses, but later asks Brian whether he too, at midnight, fears death. A twelve-foot green bird runs onstage. Terrorists attack.

“What the hell?” an audience member whispers.

I love when Sound Operator Sahara Pohatu-Trow rewinds the action with that classic cassette screech. Then, for one unforgettable moment, she floods the stage with a mellow waltz as Lighting Technician Chelsea Guthrie spotlights Maisie while Alice and Brian slow dance in the dark – a rare display of tenderness in Caryl Churchill’s increasingly vicious script. 

The repetition, which is tedious, is alleviated by the cast acting in fast-foward, or recapping from a landmark in the script.

I feel grateful the people in my life are not as dysfunctional as these characters. And while the plot varies, I can’t say it resolves. But all the narrative dissatisfaction dies away as I watch the fabulous Alice reveal her affair. Bathed in red light she bends, flexes, and flagrantly crosses the boundaries of sexy posturing for an elderly mother character. She’s supple and limber but she hides her elegance in a superbly clownish performance.

As directed by Jordan Wichman, Heart’s Desire exhausts me, but she certainly ratchets up that tedium of waiting and she grants the audience the vicarious – if imaginary – thrill of daring to point out the elephant in the room, to be unnaturally frank with one another, to burst, and to wreak havoc, freely.

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There’s more than a little Beckett or Ionesco in this one-acter by Caryl Churchill, the first in a two-play work called Blue Heart (1997) which I’d not seen before. I’m glad I’ve seen at least one half of it now – it’s very entertaining.  

The writer sets you at ease to start with, but only momentarily, then turns the play’s single scene upside-down, round-about and sideways, playing with your responses for the remainder of an hour.

The interior setting looks ‘normal’ enough: table and chairs; suggestion of a kitchen with an oven and casserole on top; an old black chord phone on a small side shelf, beside a graduation photo; the odd plate, knife, vase. As the curtain opens, the characters look as if they fit in this room of three walls, and their first actions also seem fitting. But no sooner is the play underway, than the curtains are abruptly closed and we return to the start, to the music of Vera Lynn singing ‘We’ll meet again’. This is the motif of the whole: expect nothing or expect the unexpected.

Over a number of false starts we discover that parents Alice (Terry MacTavish) and Brian (Bruno Willis), joined by Aunty Maisie (Ellie Swann), are expecting their daughter/ niece home from Australia. How should she be received, if and when she arrives? How long will they have to wait? (that’s Maisie’s question.) Is a platypus a marsupial or not? (Maisie again.) Before long we are asking ourselves – silently, I hope – where is this going? Is it going anywhere?

When this is such a short piece, I refrain from dropping spoilers, in aid of the proper enjoyment you might expect to receive for your $7 (max) – yes, it’s a very accessible show.

To use a buzzword of the times, this small ensemble is nimble in all aspects of line-delivery, playing with tone, mood, pace, till you think they must have exhausted all possible variations, then taking to communication of another kind, as the script lends itself willingly to physical farce.

The work of lighting designer Chelsea Guthrie and the sound-track by Sahara Pohatu-Trow add more dimensions to a fast-paced experience, making sudden switches of thought and emotion more surprising with appropriate imagery.

It’s a clever choice to mount this production now, when many daughters are coming home from overseas, not knowing how their family has fared without them, having had their relationships disrupted and their patience stretched, perhaps, by quarantine. As director Jordan Wichman points out, there is a slightly serious point to all the waiting and wondering, as the population at large has been doing just that for the best part of this year.

Because a rehearsed reading prepared in August could not be offered to the public, the group have relished the opportunity to present this witty, satirical gem of a play, giving it their own creative spin.

A bit of existentialism for light relief, anyone? This is for you.

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