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Bondage Director: Don Barker Holden Street Theatres, Fri 21 Oct, Season closed British playwright David Hines had bumped around the culture business for over thirty years before he wrote his first script of note, 'Bondage'. After having a shot at dancing and ballet, and later filling jobs in publishing and film, he found himself driving taxi part-time to make some dough to sustain his writing. While ferrying innumerous prostitutes between bedrooms and the beat, Hines got an earful of the trials and tribulations of a street walker, and it didn't look like 'Pretty Woman'. He wrote this one-woman monologue to set the record straight by giving voice to the unglamourous life of a real prostitute. Martha Lott's performances in 'Myth, Propaganda & Disaster...' and 'Trojan Women' in recent times have been awesome. Indeed, she won an Adelaide Critic's Circle Award for her star turn in 'Private Lives' in 2002. It's difficult to file this work under P for play. In trying to tell it like it is, Hines wrote something more like a dramatised interview and eschewed some vital bits like setting, character establishment, story, motive, climax and resolution. We join Liz (Lott) on the street as she goes about her business and we observe her code of conduct, learn of her domestic and professional concerns and are astonished at her matter-of-fact acceptance of past humiliations. However, her night turns out to be a particularly dull one and very little of the past is re-enacted to compensate for the lack of activity. While The Cross is referred as the setting, director Don Barker dressed the street like we're in a country town with a few of the locals driving by every now and then. Incongruously present are the clichˇ park bench and old-fashioned city streetlight. Unfortunately, the potential johns drive by upstage and Martha Lott is terribly disadvantaged to the audience in these imaginary conversations. Writer Hines doesn't let Liz give much away in the arena of who or why, but she expresses herself like she started in the trade to earn a few bucks while studying psychology and then forgot to pick up her degree. Barker and Lott chose to deliver the lines in a low key, nearly deadpan, naturalistic style, but the lack of diversity in emotion and inflection did not encourage my interest.  |
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