Falling and Other Short Plays

ANGIE FARROW, FALLING AND OTHER SHORT PLAYS (WELLINGTON, NZ: STEELE ROBERTS, 2014)Falling and Other Short Plays by New Zealand playwright Angie Farrow showcases a seven-year body of work. The volume includes fourteen of Farrow's distinctive short-form works, which have won her considerable acclaim including awards from the Inspirato Festival in Canada, and Short and Sweet Festivals in Singapore, Sydney and Auckland. Farrow's sure hand and distinctive theatrical imagination are evident across the anthology. The plays are skilfully compressed, sparking with vivid and surprising imagery, while recurrent thematic concerns unite the collection.In her Introduction to the book, Farrow remarks that 'the short form thrives when it is loaded with event, meaning and intensity of feeling'. The plays commonly compress epic events to their most concentrated form. The Perfect Life, for example, begins with Jethro's birth - 'I never expected this! An audience' (152) and ends with his death - 'It's like dreaming' (159). Similarly, Lifetime depicts a marriage from meeting to old age and everything in between. Its two characters, Megan and Elliot, figuratively dance their way through the twists and turns of a life-shared before returning us to their initial chance meeting. Like other plays in the collection, including The Perfect Life, this one ends ambiguously, deliberately blurring the boundaries between life-as-lived and life-as-dreamed.Farrow's manipulation of time, particularly her ability to fuse realtime and dream-time, is one of the most striking features of the plays. Replay, a «oir-ish farce, cleverly splices temporal layers in order to create effective suspense. The play begins with a crime scene: a man lies dead on the floor while a woman stands over him with a gun. Unfolding the steps that led to the murder, the narrative then moves in reverse through a device that allows characters to call 'replay'. For example, after the play opens, Jeremiah (Jem), who has being lying dead on the floor, mysteriously returns to life. Beth, with the gun still in her hands, commands him: 'In the corner! We're going to do it again.'When Jem protests:'You can't change time, Bethany', she retorts:'I killed you once. I can kill you again! Replay!' (94-5). Thus begins a highly farcical series of dramatic spirals that eventually return us to the opening scenario. While the play features infidelity, guns, and lovers hiding in cupboards, the dramaturgical structure of the play gives the work a self-consciousness that makes it more than a simple farce. Rather, like other plays in the collection, the heightened theatricality denotes something of the existential absurdity of the characters' predicaments.What makes the plays particularly successful is the fact that Farrow does not sacrifice depth of characterisation in order to achieve effective dramatic compression. Her largely female protagonists are complex figures who span a range of ages and situations but are commonly united by a sense of estrangement from the everyday. Plays such as Falling and The Blue Balloon typify Farrow's interest in characters who struggle to orient themselves according to the gravitational laws of their given worlds. In Falling, Holly is afflicted with a vertigo-like condition where, as the chorus states at the beginning of the play:Holly Hickory Beaumont feels like she is perpetually falling.And because she feels like she is falling ...[Holly falls to the floor.]She falls. (14)The emotional power of the play comes from the manner in which Holly's physical condition viscerally expresses a parallel psychological precarity: 'I'm in the abyss. And there is no bottom. And there are ledges I cannot reach, and footholds that crumble on sight, and ancient muddy arms that cannot hold onto me, and soothing voices that turn to screams' (15). In The Blue Balloon, the mysterious titular balloon mesmerises an entire city, seeming to act as a vessel for every kind of desire and in so doing up-ends the normative structures of daily life. …

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