Barbara Frame reviews Taking Off, Athenaeum Theatre, Thursday, May 14
Memories of Europe are part of New Zealand's collective consciousness: the misery of cheap London hotels, the glory of Paris, the length of the lines outside the Uffizi, the terrible insult of being taken for Australian - but above everything is the exhilaration of simply being there.
Taking Off is about four middle-aged women, unknown to each other at the outset and mostly still unknown to each other at the end, who decide independently to take the plunge, buy the tickets and have their own, if belated, OE. The characters are on stage all the time, but there is no interaction between them. They relate their stories in various ways. Nurse Noeline (Toni White) tells hers to friends on her laptop; deserted farmer's wife and aspiring novelist Ruth (Ellie Swann) puts it all into the book she's writing; tea towel-collecting Jean (Elsa May) confides in her diary; and Frankie (Amy Abbott), the play's drama queen intent on escaping her dull husband, pours her version of events into her phone. Their experiences are mostly common ones: arrival in London, despair at how much everything costs, wanting to go home, running out of money, finding a job and a decent place to live in, falling in love. Because they are such different people, their reactions vary hugely.
Playwright Roger Hall's special talent for making everyday New Zealanders endlessly interesting is evident throughout the play, and Julie Edwards' direction of four highly capable actors in this Globe Theatre production makes the most of the women's ordinariness and, especially, their differences. Always entertaining, the production is also thought-provoking and (so interval conversations indicated) leads to reminiscence and re-examination of ideas of ''home''.
Because major repairs to the Globe Theatre are in progress, Taking Off is being performed at the Athenaeum Theatre in the lower Octagon. The season will run until May 23.
