Wicked Sisters
Writer: Alma de Groen
Director: Nadia Tass
Reginald Theatre, Seymour Centre
November 6, 2020 – December 12, 2020
Wicked Sisters is an excellent piece of theatrical entertainment. While it encompasses many themes relevant to our times, the dynamics between the four middle-aged women, former friends reunited after several decades, is completely engrossing.
Their reunion is an outcome of the death of brilliant AI researcher Alec Hobbes, the husband of Meridee (Vanessa Downing), and a brutally selfish man who had made use of not only Meridee, but her three friends, Lydia (Deborah Galanos), Judith (Hannah Waterman) and Hester (Di Adams) in order to promote his ambition, success and personal vanity and sexual comfort. A rigorous Social Darwinist, Hobbes would have had no compunction in exploiting the women as he was a “winner” and they – the weaker – are “natural” victims in an always competitive universe.
A huge overhead visual surround with sound effects (design, Tobhiyah Stone Feller) representing Alec’s research into artificial lifeforms evolved from random computer programs in the process of inventing strategies to survive or else dying out, could have been distracting. However, what takes place in Alec’s study where the women meet – and which progressively undergoes a “feminisation” – its bareness overlaid by food, wine glasses, coats, bags, scarves – is far, far more preoccupying. Drinking liberally, the women chat, superficially catty and amusing but at the same time, tensions simmer.
Once Hester arrives, the tensions erupt. The apparently unsuccessful one – the bejeweled Lydia is an estate agent, Judith a PR/spin doctor and Meridee the wife of a genius – Hester cleans toilets between writing unpopular articles on bio-diversity and caring for her invalid friend Rosie. It seems Hester has come with an agenda as she does not drink and is less talkative – although hers are the best and most quotable lines – as the others progressively expose why they “are hurting so much”. Ironically competitive, Meridee responds with what she feels is the biggest “reveal”.
Hester, however, can cap them all and as a consequence takes Lydia’s treasure, Judith’s Mercedes, her “baby”, and Meridee’s vicarious place as spouse to a genius. Is she just another Smart Alec but in disguise, outwitting her less intelligent friends when the opportunity arises? Or is she as her name, Hester Sherwood, implies, a Robin Hood with a more empathetic way of achieving survival? While at the close, it may seem that none of the characters will essentially change their mode of survival their role is really to ask us to question our values before the clock, referenced in the opening line of the play, stops ticking.
Congratulations to Nadia Tass for her strong directorial vision in focussing Wicked Sisters upon women’s relationships, and congratulations to the four amazing actors, each so fascinating, who brought her vision so compellingly to the stage.
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theatre@ssh.com.au
