Honey
By Joseph Harper
Production One of the Tiny Spectacle/Shitty Lyricism Season
Produced, Designed and Directed by Joseph Harper
Music and Sound by Tom Harper
Operated by Ruby Reihana Wilson and Chris Stratton
The Basement (Studio), Lower Greys Ave, Auckland CBD
Koha on departure
11-15 September, 2012 at 7pm
Reviewed on 11 September, 2012
Published at http://www.theatreview.org.nz
Tiny Spectacle/Shitty Lyricism is an evening of two short plays each written and directed by Joseph Harper. Honey comes first and is followed, after a 20 minute interval, by The Boy and the Bicycle. Both shows have been performed before but in Wellington so that doesn’t count.
This season is performed upstairs – at the Basement – which sums it all up.
Really, it does.
There is an aura of sublime chaos about the evening which is both infectious and disarming. The writer/producer greets the audience – a full house – at the door to the studio and hands out what the programme itself describes as a ‘programme thing’ – a single sheet, ‘but only if you’d like one. You don’t have to take one, it’s up to you’.
I took one, and I’m glad I did.
It’s hand-written – a last minute thought, perhaps – on a scrap of lined paper and photocopied. It has witty little drawings – three of them – a mouse, something that looks like a globe and a bicycle. They remind me of something I might scratch out, not skilled but almost recognisable. The information has been hurriedly cobbled together but is all I need. All anyone would need. At the bottom of the scribbled sheet there is a reminder, almost legible, that if we want ‘more information’ we should go to josephernest.blogspot.co.nz.
I did, but later.
I didn’t realise at the time but the evening had been beautifully encapsulated in this sweet-natured exchange.
The actor had connected with his audience – smart work. He now knew more about us than we knew about him. He’d eyeballed us and knew that we were almost as anxious as he was.
Somewhat heartening, I’m sure, as what was to come was, for Harper, more than a little autobiographical, exposing, and to us startlingly intimate.
He needn’t have worried.
Truly.
After all, he knew what was coming and we did not.
I’d brought my family, a last minute decision, so my ten year old son was still in his karate gi. I hoped the decision would prove to be appropriate and it turned out it was.
Totally appropriate.
It was, in fact, a very happy choice.
It was clear from the outset that Tiny Spectacle/Shitty Lyricism had been staged ‘on the cheap’ but only as regards trappings and trimmings. Everything else it had ‘in spades’.
Later I found an anchor statement, written by Harper, for the season at Bats Theatre. He stated that the plays are ‘attempts to express what it feels like to be a person who is alive and alone and surrounded by other people and maybe feeling trepidation but is alive nonetheless’.
Specifically about Honey, he says it is about love and won the award for ‘best newcomer’ at the 2012 Fringe Festival (the real one in Wellington). It features kissing and earnestness and backyard astronomy and leaps of broken logic and mice and cheese and easy-going colloquial language’.
He’s right about Honey – but not about the Wellington Fringe Festival being the real one. There are others …
Of both plays he concludes they’re shows about contact and isolation; with people and one’s self and one’s astral plane.
Honey opens with a scene featuring a mouse (Virginia Frankovich, the aforementioned ‘best newcomer’ from the Wellington Fringe).
Frankovich has been around the traps for awhile and is most impressive. She trained in physical theatre at the John Bolton School, has worked with ATC and already has a striking set of performance credentials.
Mouse appears intermittently throughout the 50 minute journey to tell us about the importance of cheese, how there is a place deep in her being where cheese rules and how life is about the uncontrollable urge to get the cheese even though you know that death is the probable outcome and that, ultimately, the odds are stacked against you. A life without cheese, she tells us, is no life at all. She digresses with descriptions of what she does with fluff and grass and we fall for her hook, line and sinker – but she never lets us forget that getting the cheese always comes at a price.
Mouse is dexterously fashioned and Frankovich is both likeable and a highly skilled and subtle artist. As an envoy for the play’s most powerful metaphor she completes the mission splendidly.
Harper and Frankovich then develop their central human characters with a transcendent naturalism, so sharp that, if we didn’t know better, we’d think they were making it up. Harper’s scripting is clever and richly textured and, for complex stuff, remarkably lucid. Harper is a somewhat self-effacing performer who cleverly hides his significant talent behind a ‘not quite up for it, boy next door’ façade but we’re not really fooled.
Not really, but we go along with it.
For appearances sake, you know what I mean.
Each character has solo chunks of the action where the emotional revelations are personal, raw, intimate, funny and painfully real.
Harper’s solo, a self-described ‘black hole metaphor’, and his exploration of spaghettification are an expansive attempt to universalise everything because ‘it’s all a bit scary’ but that, because of all this, there is actually no need to be afraid. It’s intelligent and intricate but delivered with an effortlessness that is commendable.
When the actors coalesce, quite literally, to dance Harper’s verbal pas de deux there are moments of pure magic. We learn what they fear from relationships, what they love about each other – bums, eyes, toothpaste squeezing – and we see them explore the ostensibly preposterous to solve the universal dilemma of remaining in a constant state of discovery, of finding ways in which love can be sustained forever, of having something good come to an inevitable end, of the tragic role played by compromise and, ultimately, of fathoming the unfathomable.
Honey is deep but deceptive.
It’s presented in a casual ‘take it or leave it’ style that’s contagious and illusory. It draws us in like flies to a honey pot and once we’re trapped it doesn’t let up until we think we understand, until we see eye to eye with Harper’s bizarre premise, until he’s got completely under our skin and we willingly agree with everything he proposes. He does this by knowing us, by fathoming who we are, by recording, with an uncompromising lyricism and never-ending good humour, our deepest fears and our most discontented hurts.
Frankovich and Harper are good singly, even better together, have a striking vehicle to communicate Harper’s untamed vision of the world (and beyond) and know how to work the room with integrity and panache.
Honey is thought-provoking work and, alone, worth venturing out on a spring night to experience. Harper’s script is stylish, challenging and witty, the material intimate yet universal, there are excellent performances and it’s just the right length.
It’s deceptive, though, very deceptive, and it’s sweet. Like the honey of the title.
It sidles into your space and invades you.
It resonates.
Most of all, it resonates.
dykiegirl 