Twigs That Never Took

A woman, ‘Bianca’, in a wedding dress, talks about her life from flower girl to First Communion to her own first and then second weddings…  Bianca loves weddings, loves the euphoria of them, the ceremony, the music.  It’s afterwards, when real life resumes, that is the problem.

Donna de Palma engages our sympathy from the start with her mobile face and confiding, apparently confident manner.  And we’re curious.  Why the wedding dress?  Is she about to be married?  Again?  Or is she just ‘dressing up’?  Is she a sort of Miss Havisham figure?  It turns out perhaps not quite so tragic, but not a million miles away.  Despite the wedding dress, she proceeds almost like a stand-up comedian, not just in her direct address to the audience and her humour, but in the way she moves from topic to topic as this one or that one runs out of puff. 

The show deals with ‘issues’ as she puts it in her program note – and is held together by the uncertain metaphor of the ‘twigs that never took’.  The literal twigs are cuttings of various herbs which Bianca hopes will ‘strike’ – that is, sprout roots and grow.  But hers don’t.  She pots them and they die.   

Ms De Palma’s greatest strength is mimicry – or ‘character comedy’ – and she is marvellous at it.  Her evocation of a rather brutal beautician, intent on total depilation, is spot on and very funny.  Her impersonation of spinster sisters in Italy is uncanny and suddenly touching.  But the show moves on from these moments to something else.  What about her two husbands?  Surely there’d be some acid humour in them?

Bianca sets up that she is minding someone’s cat.  That involves some miming, but it leads to perhaps the show’s real misfire.  She retires behind a screen and there is a sequence of shadow puppetry in which the cat gets a voice (somewhat muffled behind the screen) and we learn that ‘he’ is a ‘she’ and on heat.  So, the cat stands in for Bianca?  It’s as close as the show coyly gets to the topic of sexual needs – and there’s an ‘issue’ since women ‘of a certain age’ are assumed to have none.  Why couldn’t dramaturg Angela Costi and director Carmel Hyland have nudged a development there – quite apart from helping to make the show a more coherent whole?  The cat sequence raises a few titters from the audience, but it feels much too long as well as being another change of mode and simply out of keeping with the rest.

Ms de Palma is an endearing and talented performer, but she wouldn’t be the first to devise her own show from things she does very well and mix ‘em up with things she doesn’t.  The program hints that this is a show that continues to develop since its first outing at the 2017 Melbourne Fringe.  I hope it well.  This performer deserves better.

Michael Brindley

Image by Moira Callegari