'A Play About Ivy, That Is Really About June' / Melbourne Fringe October 5th-8th
A PLAY ABOUT BEING LONELY, THAT IS REALLY ABOUT LOVE
The first thing I thought about after seeing and hearing the first two scenes of Olive’s play was Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho – line after line of pure, desperate longing:
“I would not think to touch the sky with two arms”
Or this:
“for when i look at you, even a moment, nospeaking is left in meno: tongue breaks and thinfire is racing under skin”
Or this:
“As sometimes at sunset the rosyfingered moon surpasses all the stars. And her light stretches over salt sea equally and flowerdeep fields.”
Despite being the ancient world’s lesbian covergirl, there is no way of being sure that Sappho was such. Nobody’s saying she’s straight either, obviously (see: I simply want to be dead. / Weeping she left me).
Still, history cannot quite decide what to cast her as. We gaze, with a contemporary eye, on her expressions of desire and attempt to give them a name. There is nothing wrong with this, of course. Humans cannot help but assign, use the safety of categories to make sense of the world. But this asks – is queerness not simply an expression of desire, and the rest only semantics?
Tickets to ‘A Play About Ivy, That is Really About June’.
A Play About Ivy, That Is Really About June, is not Really About Being Gay. This much seems clear. It’s not not about being gay, either. It just is. Expressions of desire without any given name. There is a lot about this work that makes me excited: it has a sincerity, an earnest ambiguity, that feels like a testament to its recency. A script birthed from the summer just gone, completed as the trees let their leaves darken and fall. A letting go, of a story and of a season.
The production will make its debut at Melbourne Fringe in early October – there is a time gap of less than nine months between the script’s completion and the play’s opening night. Its proximity to the real feelings and events it sprung from is very close, in a rare and intimate way. The play’s achievement (which is to say: Olive’s, and Ella’s, and Issy’s, and the entire creative team’s, achievement) is that it is a piece that feels thoughtful and committed to good storytelling, while also retaining its freshness. It has kept the sparky energy of a new work without sacrificing quality.
It is funny, and sad, and young, and confused, and unsure. It is unafraid of its liminality (ding ding ding I will put a dollar in the buzzword jar), unafraid of sitting inside of and exploring that complicated space between emotional need and desire, fantasy and reality, friendship and _____?
You should go see this play if you have ever had a crush so awful and painful you wanted to burn all your clothes and delete yourself off the Internet. You should go see this play if you have an infected piercing. You should go see this play if your friends have banned you from rewatching Fleabag again because six times is too many.
You should go see this play if there was that one girl in Year Nine and she was your best friend and you did everything together and looking at the way her cheekbone made contact with sunlight made you want to cry and vomit and you couldn’t articulate why and now you guys don’t talk for reasons both complicated and simple and when you try to explain the particulars of this relationship out loud you find you just can’t and there aren’t words for it and you still have that one weird t-shirt of hers she slept in at the bottom of a drawer and you really should’ve given it to Savers by now but you just -
You should go see this play if your socks feel weird in your shoes.
A PLAY ABOUT IVY, THAT IS REALLY ABOUT JUNE by Olive Weeks, presented by FlickFlickCity opens on October 5th is showing at St Kilda Theatre Works from October 5-8 for the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
You can secure tickets (selling fast) here!
Article written by Viv Baker
Writer & Director: Olive Weeks | Featuring: Ella Newton, Isabelle Ford | Dramaturgs: Tansy Gorman, Enya Daly | Stage Manager: Sian Tjia Hennessy | Set & Costume Designer: Antigone Yannoulidis | Graphics & Media Designer: Vasilika Tsingos | Lighting Designer: Riley Stow | Composer & Sound Designer: Ayda Akbal | Producer: Flick
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