Gert and Bess

As the audience streams in to the theatre, two old women are sitting on the stage in a typically 1950s kitchen – featuring a wooden table, a Kooka stove and an ancient Kelvinator refrigerator. What follows is a spirallingly surreal conversation which covers their lives, their ideals, death, children, their increasing loss of mind and memory and one of the funniest and most tragic shows you will ever see.

The one liners start from the beginning - “All you need is the Labour Party and wheat germ – Ben Chifley and a clean bowel are the answer to everything” and continue for the whole show. But the hilarity seduces you, quietly and gradually, into the tragedy of these two women, sisters in a love/hate relationship, and their unfulfilled lives. But the humour continues throughout.

Barry Dickins has written a brilliant play and Arminelle Fleming and Kellie Esling have interpreted it to perfection with the masterful hand of Terri Brabon at the helm. Magnificently staged with a very clever set and back projections, this is one of the best yet from Theatre iNQ.

As they sit in their kitchen, working up to an imminent Christmas Day, Arthur, the husband of Gert, is dying of lung cancer in the spare room. Sometimes this is distressing, sometimes annoying, sometimes funny – when they remember it. 

Wal, the husband of Bess, is back at home, apparently also lying in bed – but because he is lazy according to his wife and sister-in-law. Also he’s a bastard. Well sometimes he is. Sometimes Bess forgets he abandoned her and her baby died and feels quite loving towards him.

The seesawing relationship between the sisters reveals more about them and their lives – lives of poverty and hardship almost completely foreign to the present day – as they swing from loving each other to hating each other and not remembering either feeling. But the jokes keep flowing.

This play teaches us, with subtle and hilarious hints, that ageing may not be as bad as we fear. That only being able to live in the moment, with all its problems, might just be a release from expectations and fear of consequences. And it might be fun. Considering all the doomsaying about the ageing of the population, Barry Dickins tells us not to be afraid.

Written expressly for Theatre iNQ, this offering from Dickins is destined to be an Australian classic.

Mary Vernon

Photographer: Chrissy Maguire