Kerosene

Kerosene is a love story told to us as a monologue by Millie (Izabella Yena), a girl from the outskirts of Melbourne.  It’s not a romantic love story, not a sexual love story, not a bluff, matey love story.  It is the story of the deep bond of friendship between two schoolgirls that endures unbreakable through vicissitudes and separations into adulthood.  It is, if you like, initially an attraction of opposites.  Millie, the storyteller, is the misfit, the tough guy, the sporty ‘take no shit’ one.  Her friend Annie is the ‘pretty one’ – the one who can wear the opal necklace Millie gives her and look good.  But this is no princess and courtier relationship: Millie and Annie are equals who swear loyalty to each other, no matter what.  When Annie suffers horrific abuse, Millie will take revenge.

The monologue is not my favourite form of theatre, but Kerosene goes beyond the usual ‘let me tell you what happened’ story told in hindsight.  If I were to be particularly picky, I might say that here the narrative rambles a little in places and maybe includes things for their own sake.  I might say that the climax is almost overwhelmed by the power of the emotions that surround it. 

But here is a story so totally in sync with the narrator’s character (the story makes the character) and given texture throughout with telling specific detail.  It is rich in subtext in that we – the audience – are led to see and understand just a little more than Millie herself.  Millie is who she is.  The play gives us a so-called ‘working class character’ without a trace of that ‘ain’t it awful’ condescension.  Nor is there any of that wistful, snivel-in-a-wet-hanky tone that can affect a monologue all too easily, begging for our sympathy.  Millie never begs for our sympathy – much as we are willing to give it.  She wants us to see how it was, to understand, sure, but she can look after herself and her story, in its way and in her way, proves that.  But then, in addition, there is Izabella Yena’s performance. 

On the totally bare Theatre Works stage, aided by nothing but Harrie Hogan’s intuitively judged lighting design and Connor Ross’s restrained sound composition, Ms Yena delivers a highly physical performance, a ball of restless but focussed energy (playing incidentally smoothly to all four sides of the stage) and segueing from matter-of-fact account (‘I think Gramps was gay’) to wry jokes, to boasting, or to modest self-deprecation, and to the tenderness that is the heart of the story: Millie’s bond with her friend Annie.  A performance such as this comes no doubt from the closest collaboration between performer and director and here Benjamin Nichol (an excellent actor himself) seems to’ve fine tuned every nuance and movement with a sensitive and yet objective eye.  

Kerosene is a fine show.  It conquers the Theatre Works stage. The text and the astonishing performance hold us through all its fifty-five minutes and leave us at its unsentimental end saddened but moved by human resilience and love.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Jack Dixon-Gunn