Miles Franklin and The Rainbow's End by Julia Britton
at Theatre Works until February 12, 2000
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
People's lives do not have a dramatic arc; they do not have
a climactic event at the appropriate moment to make good drama. It is essential
then to take liberties if we do not want to see a play that simply rises and
falls until - well, until it stops.
Julia Britton has written a number of literary adaptations
for stage, many of which have been directed by Robert Chuter. The latest is
Miles Franklin and The Rainbow's End which strolls through the entire lifetime
of the Australian writer from 1879 to 1954.
Rebecca Davis is a pretty and engaging Miles who is known as
Stella. She talks to the audience and other invisible characters including
family, publishers, writers and artists. She is flirted with by Norman Lindsay
and Banjo Patterson, befriended by Henry Lawson and his wife.
Davis gives life to Britton's dialogue and effectively
creates Stella, a resilient, progressive early feminist. Stella lives in a
constant tug-of-war between pursuing a writing career and the pressure to marry
that she knows will destroy any hope of a future as a writer.
The performance is set on a very restricted space, which
this show shares with Chuter's other production, Homme Fatale. Davis sits at a
writing desk, prowls around it as if caged in her various abodes in rural New
South Wales, Sydney, Europe or America.
The action is episodic. She fights off unwanted attentions
in Chicago, marches for women's suffrage in London, battles the malaria
mosquito and war in Macedonia.
It is a courageous life but Franklin failed to succeed in
publication after her first novel, My Brilliant Career, which she wrote as a
teenager. After she was found to be female, little she wrote reached the
printed page.
Ironically, she was published later in life under yet
another male pseudonym, Brent of Bin Bin. Her battle to change the prejudice
about women as writers was still unsuccessful.
The lack of dynamic development in the narrative leaves the
ending of the play an anti-climax. Such a densely written text leaves little
room for action or innovation on stage.
by Kate Herbert
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