Spoiler warning
The death of a child is every parent’s nightmare and that makes it potentially powerful theatre.

It’s well covered territory, including Carl Nixon’s The Raft which was seen in Wellington just last year. Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith takes a different tack to Nixon – here the parents have separated, as often happens, and one of them has buried their grief rather than dealing with it.
Spoiler ends

The cast of two has a monumental task. They hold the stage for 90 minutes, and must carry us with them back in time in between sparring in the present. Murray-Smith has Isabel (Michele Amas) summon her ex – William (Andrew Foster) – to her art studio for a 90 minute conversation, before his wedding to a much younger woman. She’s up front, she misses him and questions his motives for taking a trophy wife. He’s up front, he doesn’t love Isabel any more, he’s intoxicated with the fame he’s found as an actor.

So what are her motives? Not what we may think. Gradually, she tries to strip away the protective layers of pretence.

It’s that façade that makes him unlikable at the start – too loud, too cynical, too egotistic, too fake. How could she have loved this guy, how could she love him still?

That disbelief gives way, due largely to the compelling, emotionally truthful performance by Michele Amas. We see them as a young couple very much in love with each other and later as adoring parents. At the same time we’ve already seen where the baby’s death has lead them, to an acrimonious divorce.

The best moments between the two are often those where no words are spoken, it’s all in the look.

Susan Wilson and her cast have an overly wordy script to deal with. As William, Andrew Foster comes into his own about halfway through the play and that’s mainly because it needs pruning. The playwright’s language, to be sure, is gorgeous. This is a play which will resonate with many people.
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Splendid performances from Michele Amas and Andrew Foster in Susan Wilson’s understated but beautifully controlled production of Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith’s 2008 play Ninety providea stimulating and enjoyablestart to the theatrical year at Circa.

Numbers in titles are fashionable at the moment and the ninety here refers to the ninety minutes that William, a famous Globe-winning TV star, is prepared to spend with his ex-wife, Isabel, before he sets off in his chauffeur-driven car to the airport and his wedding in Paris to a young, blonde actress.

Isabel is an art restorer – she is working on restoring a poor copy (not to mention a rather handy theatrical symbol) of van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage – and she is still in love with William and is determined, if not to win him back, at least to make him acknowledge that their life together cannot just be discarded and forgotten.

William is all smart, witty banter, with Wildean statements about what women want and men don’t and vice versa. Isabel gives as good as she gets in their aggressive/defensive discussions about love, sex, food and their daughter Bea. But it is all a bit too glib and smartly scripted, and it gets to be rather like an episode from Frasier when we are told that the chauffeur is reading Proust.

Scenes from their life together are played out in flashbacks most of which are set comic pieces: her seduction of William when he was her drama teacher; his funny, embarrassing and unusual proposal of marriage; his description of coping with a sick, crying Bea about which Isabel has the shortest and funniest put-down line in the play.

In the last 30 minutes the play changes tack, a tack that is predictable from near the start, and if it weren’t for the compelling performances it would be hard not to believe the playwright was struggling to find a strong emotional ending, and as it is she has journeyed where other playwrights have often gone before to find one.
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The ninety-minute time-limit William has put on his meeting with ex-wife Isabel, before he flies back to Paris to marry his German actress-cum-dog-walker fiancée Vera, is both a blessing and a curse in Joanna Murray-Smith’s adroitly crafted Ninety. While it ‘cuts to the chase’, dispensing with exposition (and such niceties as her offering him a drink although she sips a wine from time to time, in this production anyway), it leaves an awful lot of questions unanswered, which is not necessarily a bad thing. 

Isabel, played by Michele Amas with a contained emotional depth that keeps us guessing throughout as to exactly what she is up to, is an art restorer, working on bringing Flemish painter Jan van Eyck’s portrait of a husband and pregnant wife back to life in preparation for a private sale.

As the ex-acting teacher who has met with success in Hollywood but has yet to authentically embody himself, Andrew Foster makes splendid sense of William’s skills and shortcomings. Thankfully the symbolism of both their vocations is not over-stated.

Abetted by the deft touch of director Susan Wilson, the pair create a variously volatile, simmering and intimately tranquil chemistry that fully validates the nature of their relationship. Designer Ulli Briese’s set and lighting ensures their present encounter is effortlessly merged with their re-experiencing of key moments in their shared past.

The downward pressure the deadline puts on Isabel’s quest to lay the ghost of their five-years-gone marriage, in the face of William’s apparent indifference, infuses the play with a deep vein of dramatic energy. Because the action is driven by her need to make sense of what’s happened, much is left out of the sketched-in bits of back-stories and wider contexts. How, for example, did they relate to their respective extended families? How did he make the leap from being a drama teacher to a Hollywood screen-actor? Surely these things had an effect on their relationship too.

If we took the on-stage action as a summation of their whole relationship, we may be tempted to see Isabel and William as shallow, self-obsessed sybarites intrinsically doomed to never find lasting happiness with anyone, including themselves. But no; from the ‘book’ of their courtship, marriage, breakup and subsequent lives, Murray-Smith has plucked the passages that most encapsulate what they had, and that now raise the questions Isabel wants answered. That said, I can’t help but wonder what she may have cut to ensure the play runs 90 minutes exactly (which it does).

Both characters are adept with words. She uses them to get to the nub and heart of things, although she’s given to sweeping generalisations: “All women want / need / think / feel …” etc. Despite having won a Golden Globe (as a supporting actor, presumably), he avoids connecting with emotional truth in the real world, protecting himself with a witty cynicism. This makes for much verbal comedy of insight and anguish into the nature of male-female relationships (with much focus on sex), not to mention parenting, etc.

There are hints early on about something more profound that they’re not confronting. Our desire to know more is well provoked before it finally comes to the fore, subtly and minimally. And when it does, our understanding of what each of them truly wants and needs changes significantly. To reveal more would be a spoiler. Suffice to say there is resolution and a healing of sorts, which leaves us to ponder whether the way is now clear for their relationship to flourish anew or for them to go their separate ways.

It would be glib for the playwright to offer an answer within the prescribed 90 minutes, and neither she should. While we may conjure with the possibilities of what may happen next, in the shorter or longer terms, the immediate value this production offers is in its provocation to consider the values we bring to our own lives and relationships. A play that does that has got to be good.
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