One of the perils of living a long time is experiencing your peers die off until you are the only one left.
At that point, who do you talk to about your past? How can you reminisce about a life lived to the full, with all its up and downs and friends and clowns?
Fortunately for writer and performer Jonny Hawkins, there’s a ready audience for his alter ego, the feisty matriarch Maureen, in this solo show directed by co-creator Neil Ranney at the Wānaka Festival of Colour.
Hawkins doesn’t just act Maureen — he transforms into Maureen, with her quick eye, sharp wit, withering tongue, marvellous mannerisms and great big kind beating heart.
Maureen lived in Sydney’s Kings Cross as it morphed from a scintillating centre of sleaze and crime to its current status as an edgy tourist mecca for enjoying nightlife without fearing for your life. Maureen has seen it all.
Now she’s in her 80s, seeing out her remaining days in a velvet rut of cultured comfort at the Cross. We’re invited into her apartment and soon she is sharing precious memories, with her cigarette in one hand and her audience in the other.
A host of colourful characters from her past — long dead by now — become flesh and blood again during her fabulous story-telling, their eccentric interactions revealing the wisdom that has emerged from decades of of life lessons.
Hawkins’ performance is an impressive exercise in mannered restraint, giving Maureen the support and respect that is so often denied the elderly. “Don’t handle us,” says Maureen. “Engage with us.”
There is also huge depth in what Hawkins hints at but doesn’t have Maureen say. Less is more, but it’s plenty enough.
This is a spell-binding show, quietly poignant yet laugh-out-loud funny, wise without preaching, and surprisingly affirming. Like Maureen, highly memorable, and deservedly so.
Maureen — Harbinger of Death
Lake Wanaka Centre
Friday, March 31
- Review by Nigel Zega
