The making of too much apricot jam, an escape from an island by six women, a book called ‘Magic for Dummies’, a trek up a mountainside, what is the love of your life, and then back home to Plimmerton. These are roughly the essential points (or what I could gather from the events on stage) of The Love of Your Life which is described as a doco-fable, a modern New Zealand fairytale. 

It is also described as a cross between the TV shows Lost and Summer Heights High. Lost is about the survivors of a plane crash on a remote island, while Summer Heights High is a mockumentary set in an Australian high school. A programme note also tells us that this show was devised by experimenting with mockumentary, documentary and Shakespearean storytelling as a means to play with form.

Though never having watched either TV show I can see the connections to this good-natured 45 minute slight comedy but the Shakespearean storytelling seems a bit of a stretch.

All the women are amusingly portrayed and individualized by Emma Draper and Kate McGill, particularly when they sing an anthem entitled Conservation and during a piggy-back chase.

However, the mockumentary aspect never gets developed despite occasional recaps of the events so far and somehow it all gets a bit strange with the women often plodding about in buckets on their feet or their heads. Buckets litter the stage and a stack of them represent the mountain. A bizarre muddle of a modern fairy tale.
_______________________________
For more production details, click on the title above. Go to Home page to see other Reviews, recent Comments and Forum postings (under Chat Back), and News.  

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

What a delightful 45 minutes The Love of Your Life turns out to be. Despite being a totally fanciful – and inconsequential? – story, it is well structured to reveal an engaging range of characters winningly played by their creators, Emma Draper and Kate McGill.

The premise is fabulous (in its literal sense). Twelve years (or was it months, weeks or days?) ago a conservator and compulsive supervisor called Hilary (McGill), from Colorado, dabbled in ‘Magic For Dummies, vol 2’ and somehow transported herself and her Kiwi colleague Sharon (Draper), mother of three girls from Plimmerton – accidentally bringing four women and two girls plus bits of their homes along for the ride – to the remote and hitherto uninhabited Puck Puck Island, somewhere off New Zealand, Antarctica and Australia.

“This show was devised by experimenting with mockumentary, documentary and Shakespearean storytelling as a means to play with form,” their programme note reveals. “For this first stab … we have chosen to focus primarily on character development.”

Indeed the characters are strongly and skilfully delineated, mostly with minimal changes to physique and voice but invested with a deep-set sense of complete being within. They are revealed as Hilary attempts to corral them for the ascent of a mountain, atop which they hope to catch a storm to take them home, if her next attempt at magic works.

Pat (McGill), a gentle soul who makes apricot jam, and bread-maker Barb (Draper), who ran the Four Square in Plimmerton and still keeps tabs on what everyone owes, jog along in mutual support. So too do Hine (Draper), and Miri (McGill) in their idiosyncratic ways.  

Two young girls, Brooke (Draper) and Bailie (McGill), complete the stranded octet, extracted from their ‘real’ world as they were beginning to connect with notions of romantic love, so innocence and inquisitiveness drive their youthful energy. These are characters who make me think I must have misheard “12 year ago” as their ‘tweeny/teen’ personae cannot have evolved on a remote island devoid of popular media.  

As with Shakespearean conventions, not to mention TV documentaries and ‘reality’ shows, some characters address us directly despite being isolated on this remote island. Audio logs are also used as a device and although they can offer a concise form of exposition, they are the least compelling moments in the show. Revealing the characters and their stories in action works best.

Salvation and liberation – or a return to Plimmerton, anyway – can only occur when each character declares the love(s) of their life with total honesty: a challenge which produces some unexpected results.  

Director Aroha White ensures the space is used well and the characters’ transitions are clear and dynamic, abetted by Rachel Marlow’s lighting design, operated with great precision by Alana Kelly.

Given no set designer is credited, I assume White, Draper and McGill collaborated on the distribution and clever use of the many plastic buckets, to represent the mountain, wading in water and other aspects of life on Puck Puck.  A couple of songs – very different from each other – vary the fare, contributing to excellent variations in rhythm, flow and dramatic texture.

Earning spontaneous applause on opening night was a sequence where Bailie piggy-backs an injured Brooke with two others in pursuit: a mini symphony of Laban dynamics. (I have no idea whether Laban Movement Analysis was used to differentiate the characters throughout but rather suspect is was – to excellent effect.)

The question is, does this play stand for anything more than an opportunity to show off some performance skills? Is there metaphor or allegory to be found in their predicament and its resolution? Being billed a ‘a doco-fable’ we have to assume its fabulous elements are aligned around some meaning or moral, regarding life and the love of it.

I find myself trusting its makers to want The Love of Your Life to have depth, breadth and resonance, and sense they could answer most questions we may have. Perhaps in the next iteration they will commit to more absolutes within the work itself, so that the magical means turn out to have a more satisfyingly substantial end.

Clarifying the time issue and its implications concerning the Plimmerton they left, and how they might find it – and their loves – on their return, might be worth looking at … With the characters pretty well evolved, some rigorous play-wrighting may be what’s needed next.
_______________________________
For more production details, click on the title above. Go to Home page to see other Reviews, recent Comments and Forum postings (under Chat Back), and News.  

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer