THEATRE REVIEW: Talking Heads

Perth Theatre

****

THERE’S no doubt about the theme of Alan Bennett’s famous series of monologues Talking Heads. Its subject is death and the courage of ordinary, unremarkable people in facing the slow slide towards extinction and it’s a tribute to Bennett’s tremendous skill and grace as a dramatic writer that his plays are not actually depressing but oddly life-affirming, and often very funny.

At Perth, Michael Winter has chosen three of these memorable little pieces, each played in a small box-like set, centre-stage, that perfectly captures the sense of lives bounded by the "four walls" of the average small British home. In A Chip in the Sugar, Paul Sirr plays Graham, the dependent fortysomething son of a woman in her early seventies whose last hope of a romantic fling comes to grief, to her son’s immense relief. There’s something here about true love and how to recognise it. In the famous A Cream Cracker Under the Settee, Janet Michael plays an elderly widow, stranded on the floor of her house after a fall, who chooses death, surrounded by her memories of a happy marriage, over rescue and life in an old folks’ home.

And in the less-familiar Soldiering On, perhaps the greatest revelation of these three plays, Delena Kidd gives a truly memorable performance as a stockbroker-belt wife of the stiff-upper-lip type, whose comfortable, affluent life - and the assumptions about her family that underpinned it - gradually falls apart following her husband’s death.

"I don’t want you to think this is a tragic story," she says at the end. "I’m not that type." And you can feel the Perth audience nodding approval of a brave, uncomplaining way of life that may be disappearing from our world but which had its uses in the face of mortality, and is well worth remembering with love, as Bennett does here.

Until 23 November