Through a babble of dialogue from a seemingly mad woman, the audience went through alterations of reaction; from the bored to the captivated, and from confidants to unintentional voyeurs. The nonsense spouted at us initially felt self-indulgent and confusing, frustrating even, through its apparent absence of meaning, until, very slowly, and very carefully the threads of this woman’s loaded history were revealed to us. Slowly she unfurled for us; suddenly her ‘madness’ made sense. Then, having taken us into her confidence, she turned on the audience once again – becoming a victim, and the whole world the perpetrator. Every intangible scene she portrayed from this point was loaded with meaning; in glimpsing her history the audience could now recognise the mnemonics of trauma in her landscape, we could understand her fragility of mind, and for a time could not get away from these ‘infantas’ anymore than she herself. Until she left…and left us to get on with our lives.
What a performance from Erika Blaxland-de Lange who kept our attention for an hour and fifteen minutes with commendable urgency. This was a very loaded and poignant play by Eastern European writer Saviana Stănescu It is a shame there was a curtain-call as the impact of her desertion at the end could have been startling, a testament to the strength and conviction of her performance.
[Alice Trueman]
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