REVIEW: Charlotte Wood's THE WEEKEND Is Given The Stage Treatment With Sue Smith's Adaptation.

Thursday 10th August 2023, 7:30pm, Belvoir St Theatre

Highlighting mature women’s stories, THE WEEKEND is brought to the stage with Sarah Goodes (Director) presentation of Sue Smith’s adaptation of Charlotte Wood’s 2019 novel of the same name. Following on from being Shortlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize and ALS Gold Medal, fans of the novel have the opportunity to see the story in a different way through live performance by three fabulous female performers.

The premise of THE WEEKEND is that former restaurateur Jude (Toni Scanlan), academic author Wendy (Melita Jurisic) and veteran actress Adele (Belinda Giblin), have agreed to meet up at their friend Sylvie’s beach side holiday home, a year after Sylvie’s passing.  Their primary purpose of the Christmas weekend gathering is to clear out the house so Sylvie’s partner Gayle, who lives overseas, can sell the property but the trio end up learning more about each other and the strength of their friendship than seeming to achieve much with the clear out.  Roman Delo takes on the role of the up-and-coming but somewhat arrogant director Joe Gillespie, a young man that Adele hopes will be her meal ticket with his next big project, but the star of the show comes in the form of a puppet representation of Finn (Puppeteer: Keila Terencio, Puppet Maker: Indigo Rose Redding), Wendy’s aging dog who was a gift from Sylvie.

Designer Stephen Curtis elevates the performance space with a circular timber deck connected to the unseen house via a walkway into the vomitorium.  The corner stage is lined with a fabric backdrop on which Susie Henderson’s video design is projected, allowing the understanding of the proximity of the property to water while also reinforcing that it is nestled in the bush.  Ella Butler’s costume design conveys that these are ‘every woman’ while having unique elements that convey things like Jude’s rigidity, Wendy’s more relaxed temperament that as a social sciences academic and feminist writer, and Adele’s need to still prove her youth and femininity in an industry that celebrates young and perky. 

While the women deliver realistic physical representations of their characters, the monologues and interactions can feel that they’d read better on the page.  In trying to set up the backstories and the reasoning for how each character reacts to events and revelations, the adaptation is left with dialogue and monologues that can feel somewhat cumbersome and overdone when the women are supposed to know each other so intimately.  The underlying message of getting older, finding oneself in financial distress with little to no savings, holding onto the past, keeping secrets and respecting age and wisdom is important but not necessarily conveyed with any groundbreaking revelation, tempering the power of the piece.  As the slow moving silent observer, Finn's movement and how the dog interacts with the humans can convey more than the dialogue at times.

For those that are fans of Charlotte Wood’s writing and are familiar with the book, the stage adaptation of THE WEEKEND allows people to experience Wood’s work in a different format.  As other sectors of society have shown that it is important to see themselves on stage, THE WEEKEND is no different in providing visibility for more mature middle class white women and some of the challenges they may face though this work could do with some tightening to ensure the weight of the message lands properly. 

https://belvoir.com.au/productions/the-weekend/

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