“The Past Is A Wild Party is well worth seeing….there are few opportunities to experience sophisticated and engaging performance essays in the theatre.“
Fiona Hallenan Barker
4 scrabble letters out of 5
The Loading Dock @ QTOPIA
Sydney
10 – 27 July 2024
You look across the fruit and flowers,
My glance your glances find.—
It is our secret, only ours,
Since all the world is blind.
(Amy Levy)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an astonishing young woman in Victorian England can pen erotically charged poetry to express their sexual desires. It is this luscious queer poetry of Amy Levy that forms one of the foundation stones of Noëlle Janaczewska’s latest theatrical offering The Past Is A Wild Party.
The Past Is A Wild Party completes a trilogy of work including Good With Maps (2016) and The End of Winter (2022). This work in the trilogy is another exceptional work and reflects the ideas expressed by Radclyffe Hall in their book The Well of Loneliness:
“For the sake of all the others who are like you, but less strong and less gifte perhaps, many of them, it’s up to you to have the courage to make good.”
Using the format of the performance essay, the piece is stuffed full of literary, theatrical and historical queer references. The representation of love and “othering” is as engaging intellectually as it is viscerally and emotionally. Janaczewska explores gender, politics, censorship, lesbian pulp novels, literature, poetry, mental health, international travel and eroticism from the first blush of teenagehood through to wildly hedonistic adult lust.
Long term collaborator Kate Gaul applies her deft hand to directing Jules Billington in this gentle, and engaging romp through queer women’s history. Billington is a skilled performer who shapeshifts seamlessly from one mode of storytelling to another. Their cheeky pixie grin invites us into the closest for exploration, guiding the audience through game play, anecdote and flirtation. It is the allusion to sexual intimacy that gives this word such broad appeal; those in the know, know and those who don’t can simply imagine.
The intersectionality of the main character is not only represented onstage in the stellar performance by Jules Billington but is also reflected in the segmented narrative structure of the piece. Lighting designer Benjamin Brockman uses their magical touch in the space to weave strands of lighting across the stage as a reflection of the stands of storytelling Janaczewska and Billington bring together. Multiple tungsten globes fill the space becoming other characters in the story and setting the scene for the detailed movement around the space that takes us from romantic foggy London to the bleak isolated spaces of the character’s inner mind.
Composer Madeleine Pickard reinforces the mood and atmosphere with overall smoothness and delicacy. Occasionally the play jumpcuts between ideas and I was left wondering if a live musician would have supported the transitions in the same way that Brockman’s lighting personifies character and place.
The exhibition space also supports the work with many poignant, fabulous and hilarious works of art to explore on your way into the theatre. The Past Is A Wild Party is well worth seeing. If you are a theatre student I would say it is essential, there are few opportunities to experience sophisticated and engaging performance essays in the theatre. With a ticket price of between $35 – $45 this is the most bang for your buck you will get around town right now too. For all LGBTQIA+ and allies, highly recommended.
Fiona Hallenan- Barker, Theatre Now
