★★
At its core, Ladies Day, the new play from Alana Valentine, attempts to explore how we deal with the things we cannot deal with; how we come to terms with the unspeakable and the unthinkable. A rape serves as the fulcrum of the work, providing the moment reality itself splinters and a thousand cracked timelines spider out from that single point of contact.
It’s a play with a lot on its mind, then – too much, in fact. It’s a gruelling, difficult work; potential viewers should be warned that watching the sexual violence occur within the cramped confines of the Griffin Theatre is a very unpleasant experience indeed – but it’s also overambitious and half-baked.
Sometimes its melodrama is laughable, particularly when it comes to its stab-happy climax, and the prose frequently turns purple. Even worse, Valentine has limited control of tone. This is a play about sexual assault that also contains musical numbers; misguided moments of song that serve to immediately remove the audience from the action.
It’s also terribly academic. Valentine herself is a character in the play – or a deliberately hazy version of her, anyway – and in a lot of ways the work tries to explore the notion that art is the lie that tells the truth. But it reaches at these lofty aims clumsily, and with little subtlety, and watching seasoned actor Lucia Mastrantone gurn through a dual role as both the playwright and a police officer (geddit?) is an embarrassing experience.
It’s particularly frustrating because the play does contain moments of real power, and there are a number of monologues scattered throughout the piece that are genuinely affecting, particularly in the hands of thespians Wade Briggs and Matthew Backer, both of whom do very good work. But these flashes are few and far between, interrupted by pretentious speeches uttered by characters who never really seem real, despite the fact that much of Ladies Day’s dialogue has been lifted verbatim from the mouths of real-life people Valentine interviewed.
It’s all capped off with an ending that, though intellectually interesting, is really no more than a kind of shaggy dog conclusion, the artistic equivalent of “it was all a dream”. It’s a whimper rather than a bang; a workmanlike tying up of some very loose ends, and a soggy finale for a work that promises so much more than it ever really delivers.
Photo: Brett Boardman
Ladies Day is playing at SBW Stables Theatre from Friday February 5 – Saturday March 26.
