Are You There?

It’s the Friday before a long weekend at aged-care facility Autumn Dale Village.  Admin – and a lot more – Pia (Melanie Madrigali) is dealing with phone calls, emails, rosters, a bullying superior, her ex-husband, and a fractious 13-year-old daughter.  She does all that while staying available and sympathetic to residents dementia sufferer Lauren (Rosemary Johns) and ever-anxious, garrulous Colleen (Jane Clifton).  If the play sounds potentially close to sit-com, Irene Korsten’s day-in-the-life play does veer close to that, but genuine, angry conflict, memory and regret, and poignant enigma make it more. 

It all plays out on Josh McNeill’s set – the care home’s foyer that is Pia’s workstation, the crossroads for Colleen’s unceasing trundling about on her noisy walker, and the site of Lauren’s mute stillness broken only by her plaintive question, ‘Are You There?’

Childless Lauren’s question suggests such a pitiful yearning for someone now gone but who might, might reappear – perhaps one of the homeless girls she helped - that we are touched and intrigued.  The more so by Rosemary John’s beauty and fragility.  Occasionally, there’ll be a lighting change (design by Tomas Gerasimidis) that freezes the other characters, and we are taken into Lauren’s memory (perhaps) in which she dances and reaches for heaven – but that’s all we get.  Any of Lauren’s history comes to us via Colleen, who used to be Lauren’s friend.  Or so she says.  Now Colleen is hostile, claiming to find Lauren irritating with her ‘are you there’ refrain.

But Colleen’s irritation is just a strand in her make-up.  Already desperately lonely, also childless Colleen has no one.  She’s terrified by Lauren in whom she sees a future in which she loses even her last vestige of control.  In Jane Clifton’s unwavering performance, Colleen is the most interesting character of the three – and it’s a little frustrating that the playwright doesn’t take her further – particularly her ambiguous and ambivalent relationship with her ‘beautiful’ but apparently promiscuous mother.  It’s unfortunate that intriguing references to Colleen’s past are passed over rather too quickly.

Instead, Colleen’s always making plans and lists of activities, harassing Pia to fix things for her.  Her constant whining and complaining come from sheer anxiety.  The long weekend stretching out ahead is particularly terrifying.  Being endlessly ‘active’ is her defence for her existential panic.  Clifton achieves a fine balance between Colleen as comic relief – although the joke does wear thin – and the tragedy of her life which has ended her here, in Autumn Dale...

Although Pia has the most plot per se, she is most conventional of the three characters.  Madrigali does well, giving Pia a warm humanity, mixing frustration and patient compassion.  There’s some tension when her daughter goes missing, leading to some tense and nasty bickering – by phone – with her ex-husband, challenging him to take some responsibility.  A nice touch: suddenly bitchy Pia deliberately gets the new wife’s name wrong.  She only really touches us toward the end – and Madrigali suggests this beautifully – when Pia will have the whole long weekend to herself... but what will she do with it?  Her loneliness is suddenly palpable.

Irene Korsten has given Pia – or the actor playing her – a difficult task.  As well as many one-sided telephone conversations, there are her strained interactions with Colleen, and tussles with Lauren, plus the burden of exposition via conversations with Colleen that verge on narration. Switching among these cannot be easy and perhaps director Rachel Baring might have helped Madrigali more in distinguishing these different elements.  

Are You There is more a situation than a story.  Is that deliberate?  What we’re seeing on stage isn’t going to change.  Things will stay the same or worsen.  Lauren’s refusal to eat or drink means her death may be imminent, but otherwise there’s no development – that is, no plot.  No plot is a tough call.  Restricted to eighty minutes, these three characters must suggest far more than themselves. Despite good and interesting intentions, Are You There is not a great play because it doesn’t pursue what’s most interesting about it.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Hannah Jennings