The Girl The Woman: a reality of growing up Aussie
The struggle to find our unique Australian voice is moving like a wave throughout the cities, suburbs and streets of Australia—onto our stages and into our books. This one night in Parramatta new playwright and performer Aanisa Vylet added her voice to the growing chorus of voices that are singing a familiar yet individually unheard song.
The Girl The Woman by Aanisa Vylet tells the story of a young woman growing up in an Australian household in Punchbowl NSW. Her parents are Lebanese-Muslim migrants from Beirut. Vylet explores the tensions of being raised in the tradition of Islam & Lebanese culture, but being torn as a young person who just wants to assimilate into a westernised ideal of normal.
Walking into the Lennox Theatre at the Parramatta Riverside, the experience was mixed between walking into a circus and a traditional Lebanese home. The performers Aanisa Vylet and Nisrine Amine, welcomed the audience into the theatre space, interacting with them by greeting and small talk. The performers were made-up with face-paint that looked to be from the tradition of geisha or mime, which helped create the comedy and clowning style of exaggerated acting of the play.
Themes of sexual assault, travel, family and romantic relationships take a back-seat in this narrative as the central character grapples with who she is as a first generation Australian. The non-linear narrative would have been quite one-dimensional but for the inclusion of the mother’s story, which gives us some insight into the world that has created the central character Aanisa’s sense of reality.
Performances by Vylet and Amine were fresh and energetic. Amine’s versatility in making several temporal jumps was believable. Both performances were comically aware of themselves and well suited to the text.
The set design by Jonathan Hindmarsh was inventive and brilliant. A bunch of second-hand furniture was built into a pile in the centre of the stage and painted various tones of greys. This pile became the strange yet familiar landscape of the house, the train, the nightclub. The costume design was much like the set, all of it was on stage but revealed slowly throughout the performance by opening drawers or taking off layers. Accentuated by Benjamin Ross Brockman’s lighting design, the set and lighting created the imaginary spaces, concreting the style of the production and bringing the audience with them into the world that they and the performers partnered in constructing out of imagination and old sets of drawers.
Truly a piece of contemporary theatre, The Girl The Woman as directed by Dino Dimitriadis is irreverent and inventive. As a first attempt the piece is funny and creative and the audience truly enjoyed what may be a small piece theatre that opens minds without being didactic. There may have been several opportunities to go deeper into the vulnerability of the characters that was shied away from, but I’m sure that with time and confidence this first piece by Vylet will be a tasty light entrée before the heavier more satisfying meal.
Christina Donoghue – Theatre Now
Photo by Robert Catto, @robertcatto, @robertcattophotographer
