By Chenoah Eljan.
Noni Hazlehurst is a force. You’d watch her read the Melways cover to cover and be transfixed. She can communicate more in a half-expression than most do in a soliloquy. Fortunately, The Lark, written by Daniel Keene and directed by Matt Scholten, gives Hazlehurst a lot more to work with than our mapbooks of a bygone era. Although, the nostalgic depiction of Melbourne is not dissimilar to perusing a Melways: a reminder of a city we once knew and loved, unrecognisable in its contemporary evolution.
This one-woman show has Hazlehurst as aging publican Rose Grey, looking back on her life in the public bar where she spent nearly all of it. Keene’s storytelling is organic; Rose traverses time, characters and feelings with no evident order or structure, reflecting the true way in which the stories of our lives are not just layers but interwoven strands of meaning, events and non-events, people and the absences of people. Rose’s life story is a sad one, affable and tough-as-nails as she is. There is little room for the audience to comfort itself with silver linings or lessons learned. Sometimes life is just life, until it’s done.
Hazlehurst’s depiction of Rose is skillful and spot-on. Rose is quintessentially Australian. We have all met at least one Rose in our lives, most of us many, many more. Keene crafts Rose’s voice with a gentle understanding, a knowing, a poetry that befits her; although the only poetry Rose is likely to have read will have been scrawled on a bathroom stall door. On occasion, Keene leans a touch too far into the poetry and lets his own voice blur with Rose’s – such as when she metaphorically states “all the notes were sharp or flat” – she who has no musical education, appetite or aptitude. Rose doesn’t know the difference between a sharp or flat note. Keene would have done well to pull these few moments back and hold true to Rose’s voice. It’s a powerful one.
Emily Barrie’s set design depicts the inside of The Lark, exactly as you would have imagined it. Barrie may well have lifted the entire set straight out of a hole in the wall pub in the backstreets of Fitzroy. While the set feels authentic, if unimaginative, Scholten’s use of the set is a missed opportunity. The Lark is about a woman in the room in which she spent her entire life, but her movement in that room does not depict lifelong habits or well-worn routine. Hazlehurst’s motivation for moving from spot to spot appears to be simply to keep the audience engaged, it tells us nothing about how Rose moved in this one room every day of her life from birth until now. Rose had a lifetime of being responsible for keeping the bar clean, the taps polished, the stools tucked in, the tables wiped – actions she would have taken hundreds of times every day for seventy plus years are nowhere to be seen here. This absence is jarring in a story about being trapped in familiarity, and inconsistent with the pride Rose has in her pub. Scholten didn’t need to move Hazelhurst around The Lark like a knight fleeing a rook; as a true master of her craft Hazlehurst could stand dead still in one spot and the audience would not blink for ninety minutes.
The Lark is an evocative reminder that we are all the product of the circumstances in which we find ourselves and from which we so seldom escape. Hazlehurst is not to be missed, get your tickets now and bring your tissues.
