Colder Than Here
Writer: Laura Wade
Director: Janine Watson
Ensemble, Kirribilli
September 19 – October 12, 2024
Sensitively directed by Janine Watson, Colder Than Here is a moving and funny play about a middle-class English family dealing with terminal illness, but it is more than that. It is also about a wife and mother, whose resignation to her death is admirably up-beat but whose deep concern for her soon-to-be-bereft family is humbly heroic.
The dying Myra, performed with a sure touch by Hannah Waterman, is a strategist. She provides for Baggins the family cat by having him fostered by a neighbour aware that he will not be given the companionship he needs when she is no longer there. Her daughters don’t live at home, and her husband doesn’t have the cat’s best interests at heart. But when it comes to trying to ensure that her family have support and nurture once she has passed, the obstacles seem insurmountable. Her husband Alec (Huw Higginson) is emotionally unavailable, the elder daughter Harriet (Charlotte Friels) is overly controlled, and the younger Jenna (Airlie Dodds) is edgey and rebellious. Can she help them remain as a family when they no longer have her as an intermediary?
While her decision to take her daughters on picnics to various possible burial sites seems bizarre, there is method to it. In the opening scene Myra compels an unwilling Jenna into picnicking and takes the opportunity to tell her she has terminal cancer, and the concept of burial in a peaceful and natural environment is first raised. It is raised again, hilariously, when Myra compels her family to watch a PowerPoint presentation, she has made detailing her funeral arrangements, and as Harriet and Jenna visit various likely burial spots romantically evoked via backdrops and assemble her requested cardboard coffin pack – they begin to listen to each other.
Alec may be the biggest challenge to Myra. His introspective posture and preference for the newspaper fit well with his avoidance of sharing music with another and his reluctance to hug or hold his family members. It does seem to be owing to her encouragement that he attends a concert with Harriet, a cellist, and perhaps a shared interest can be sustained in the future. Myra’s final intimate conversation with her husband achieves a slight thaw if we take the imminent repair of the broken household heating system as a metaphor. Hopefully, the constant complaints about the lack of warmth in the home will cease.
Rather than dwell on the Bradley family coming to terms with the loss of Myra, Colder Than Here explores Myra’s struggle to ensure that love between her family survives her death.
The creative crew, Michael Hankin, Morgan Moroney, Jessica Dunn and Mark Bolotin, make clever use of the ensemble’s small stage area to evoke both the shabby, comfortable lounge room of the Bradley home and the wooded natural environment of the picnic sites. A special mention to Genevieve Graham for costumes reflecting the psychology of the characters, and praise for the actors who had a sound grasp of their roles. While Waterman was confident in the quirky character of Myra, Dodds was memorable as the insecure Jenna.
