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Used with kind permission of the Author. First published in The Sunday Age, 11th of September, 1989
by
Rosemary Neill
Please visit The Age website at www.theage.com.au
JENNY Kemp's new play flirts brazenly, almost
insolently, with risk.
Call of the Wild has a febrile vigour and an almost
sinful sexual candour, and it consists of fragmented, hallucinatory sequences
drawn from dreams, the imagination, fantasy and myth.
The play is plotless, its verbal rhythms are anarchic,
its acting is radically stylised and it suspends tense, time and reality. It is
also characterless, in that the actors represent the collective psyche, or
archetypes, rather than any one persona.
The potential imperilment that faces such a risk‑taking
work is that it can hang between lucidity ‑ telling us something about
the world and self‑absorption. Although it is sometimes selfindulgent,
and although its conclusion is disappointingly irresolute, Kemp's play mostly
keeps this danger at bay.
The Church's production which the playwright also
directs ‑ is confronting, audaciously nonconformist and utterly
transfixing. Through this production, Kemp shows that she has a boldly
calculated facility for making us flinch and for dislocating and manipulating
our expectations and emotions.
The playwright, whose last work, Goodnight Sweet
Dreams, also dealt with dreams, is primarily concerned in this work with the
subconscious life of the archetypal female in a world that both worships and
humiliates her. At the core of the narrative is Kemp's concern that people in
contemporary society keep themselves remote from their subconscious selves.
Humour
Kemp's sorties into the psyche represent an attempt to
balance the inner, psychic life with the outer, conscious one. To this degree,
Call of the Wild is a plea for the reclamation of the unfragmented, holistic
self.
In order to mimic the fragmented patternings of the
mind, the text shuttles, seemingly randomly, between concepts such as
pornography, erotica, religion, rape and housework.
The dramatic impact of many of the dream‑like
sequences relies on humour, juxtaposition and subliminal mind flashes.
For instance, In one vignette ‑ a spoof on
Cinderella or Prince Charming‑type fantasies ‑one of the ugly
sisters cuts off her heel so her foot will fit the glass slipper. This send‑up
is followed by a lightning‑quick reference to clitoridectomy, thus
crossreferencing fairytale masochism with real‑life mutilation.
The performances from the five‑member cast are
uniformly pleasing. Kemp asks much of her actors in that they must traverse
highly stylised territory without collapsing into caricature and purging their
personas of credulity.
Elizabeth Drake's sound composition is central to Call
of the Wild. Layered like filo pastry, it completes rather than frames the on‑stage
picture. (That picture includes bare‑breasted costumes, which, derived
from a European painting, are a confrontation tactic in their own right.)
Jacqueline Everitt's visually compelling set,
meanwhile, forms an aptly ethereal precinct in which the actors patrol the
darker corners of the psyche.
