Engaging look at a colourful life
Joan By Tom Scott, directed by Tim Gordon, Circa Theatre, until February 17.
Many people put their life story into print, but few go the extra step that well-known cartoonist Tom Scott has done by turning the story into a play, not only once, but twice now. His first was the semiautobiographical play The Daylight Atheist about his alcoholic father, and now, he has very cleverly put his mother’s story onto the stage in Joan, currently playing at Circa Theatre.
However, this is no solo performance portraying a chronological list of Scott’s mother’s life events, but an originally constructed piece of theatre that is engaging and insightful.
With two characters on stage, Old Joan (Ginette McDonald) and Young Joan (Kate McGill), Joan’s life unfolds in a series of memory sequences where we see the cantankerous, foul-mouthed Joan, in her last days in a rest home looking back on her life, and the young, bubbly effervescent Joan describing the hardships of growing up in Ireland, coming to New Zealand with young children, ending up in Feilding and, for the most part bringing up her family single-handed in trying circumstances.
This all plays out in the round on a very ingeniously created set of flowing white curtains by Tolis Papazoglou, that not only creates an intimacy with the characters, but allows for projected images to show the wider world outside Joan’s meagre existence.
Director Tim Gordon and his actors use the space to great effect, particularly in the first-half when old and young Joan are interacting, the effortless ebb and flow of the characters coming and going and moving about the set being highly imaginative.
Through wonderful lines of dialogue, McDonald captures beautifully the belligerency of Joan – one minute hilariously funny, the next despondently sad – while McGill shows with great feeling the enduring resilience of young Joan coping with one adversity after another.
And while the second-half changes style and format from the creative way the first half plays out, with it being little more than a half-hour narrative from Joan about her later life (the interval not helping the transition into this section either), it nevertheless completes Joan’s story and leaves the audience suitably satisfied in having seen a refreshingly new, Kiwi play that is entertaining and insightful. – Ewen Coleman