Dora

No, not Freud’s ‘Dora’, although you might have assumed so.  I did.  Freud’s famous case history, about his treatment of ‘Dora’ for ‘hysteria’ is an influence on this Dora, ‘but opaquely, and only in some small details’, according to a program note by playwright Wendy Woodson. 

What came out of Freud’s aborted treatment of ‘Dora’ for Freud himself was the concept of ‘transference’: the redirection of negative emotions experienced in the past onto the therapist.  That concept is certainly present in this curious two-hander in which the roles of patient and therapist are in opposition, overlap, merge and transmute into each other.   

There is an uncooperative or resistant patient (Ms Woodson) – though whether she simply cannot remember the past in an accessible way or is deliberately evasive is ambiguous.  We might think she is suffering from PTSD, but that seems too banal in this case.  There is a frustrated therapist (Phil Roberts) who is gradually drawn into the patient’s fragmentary narrative until he becomes a participant and more… 

Paying close attention, we gather that we are in some form of institution and that Ms Woodson is some kind of warrior returned, it seems alone, from some kind of mission that went horribly wrong. 

The therapist, so long as he maintains that role, does not succeed in ascertaining where she was or who, if anybody, was with her, or what, exactly, went wrong.  Her memories are visionary and immediate, but only to her - vivid images, but as if seen when a flash of lightning illuminates a face or a field or some water for a second.  They are specific and non-specific at the same time and she repeats them in no particular order, but enough, I must say, to create some longueurs, in which the mind is tempted to wander.

Meanwhile her therapist vainly tries make a coherent, ordered narrative out of this, using hard-edged, practical terms like ‘topography’ and ‘chronology’ and is repeatedly defeated.  He breaks off session after session with ‘I think that’s enough for today’ when it clearly isn’t.  It is only when he can get past his ordering and judging objectivity and enter her experience as it exists for her that some form or healing can take place.  But whether it is her healing or his is a question posed by the ending.

Ms Woodson and Phil Roberts play out a series of these therapy sessions on an initially bare stage, only later bringing on – and taking off – bits of unadorned furniture.  Otherwise, designer Shuan-Joel Liew’s restricts his set to two high mounted and empty window frames.  His costumes are austere and nod to the future, colour-coded grey.  Scene changes are lighting changes that are also subtly mood changes – nicely judged effects by Suze Smith.

The director, Peter B Schmitz, a dancer as well as an actor, choreographs Ms Woodson and Mr Roberts as much as he directs them in the usual sense.  Neither one dances, but speech is punctuated with abrupt movements and gestures that seem deliberately mechanical.  As a performer, unfortunately, Ms Woodson is somewhat dry and abstract; she keeps the audience at a distance as well as her therapist.  Mr Roberts is more ‘real’ (if that’s the word), but perhaps that’s because he’s enacting the frustration the audience is feeling.

Theatre, of course, is an art form, but with the poetic, allusive, calibrated Dora you know you are in the presence of Art.  Ms Woodson says it is ‘a piece about love and imagination’, but its pleasures are more aesthetic and formal than emotional. 

Ms Woodson is Roger C Holden Professor of Theatre and Dance at Amherst College, Massachusetts, and this show has had the most prodigious and high-level support – from Amherst, from the Sienna Art Institute, from RMIT here in Melbourne.  At the risk of condemning myself to the category of Philistine, I quote Queen Gertrude to Polonius: ‘More matter, less art.’

Michael Brindley