Persona

Adena Jacobs’ stage version of the Ingmar Bergman 1966 cinema masterwork comes to Sydney with considerable clout and interest. It won five of the eight available 2012 Melbourne Green Room Awards for Independent Theatre — best Production, Direction, Design, Lighting, Female Performer. And Ms Jacobs is not only the Artistic Director of Fraught Outfit, the company that devised this Persona, she’s recently been appointed as one of Belvoir’s two new Resident Directors.

It’s a short and challenging show with no easy access. For those who haven’t seen the movie much might be mysteriously opaque: is it a dream, a schizophrenic breakdown, an actor’s nightmare? It’s certainly as starkly theatrical as Bergman was resolutely cinematic.

Elisabeth, the Actress (Meredith Penman), we are told via voiceover, has had an onstage breakdown and cannot, or will not, speak. She’s been put in the care of Alma, the Nurse (Karen Sibbing), who is in awe of her famous mute patient but is soon frustrated at her inability to have any sort of conversation.

When Alma discovers that Elisabeth is viewing her as character material and is writing down the intimate sexual memories that she revealed one night, she is outraged and frenzied enough to smash a hammer into her own hand. Things get complex and steamy: nudity is inevitable. Alma has sex with Elisabeth’s suddenly arriving, equally nude husband. Or maybe not. It might be a fantasy. But whose?

Whatever the complexities, the intensity and commitment of the two merging protagonists carry the day. Sibbing is particularly fierce and uncompromising, “out of my mind,” she says, “with misery and disappointment”.

But there are long sections — long when the total running time is only 70 minutes — in which not much happens. A small boy, Elisabeth’s son, spends the first five minutes alone on stage reading a book. The young actor is whisked off home, no doubt, before the sex and nudity begin.

Frank Hatherley

Images: Meredith Penman and Karen Sibbing. Photographer: Ellis Parrinder.