A Little Room

A Little Room is the story of three lonely, grieving women: Miss Place, Lana and Betty (respectively: Gael Ballantyne, Susan Miller and Michelle St Anne), narrated by a fourth woman who may or may not be one of them (Katherine Anderson). At the piano bar of the Carrington Hotel, they go to find lost loves who won’t be joining them, and instead find each other.

A homage in part to the installation artist, Janet Cardiff, the play is described by its creator, St Anne, as her ‘interrogation into language and sound.’

And so it is. Some interrogations border on the torturous, however, and I’m sorry to say that, for me, this is one of those occasions. There are certainly moments of inspiration in the play, such as the scene where each of the women – or rather, their shadows – walks into projected black & white film footage of Miss Place dragging her shopping trolley down the road; at that point, I was somewhat reminded of Alain Resnais’ L'Année dernière à Marienbad/Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Marienbad is admittedly a bit – how should I put this? – ‘arty’ (for those who aren’t familiar with it, you can watch the trailer here). Nevertheless, last night, even arty-farty yours truly was finding things a bit of a struggle.

One of the problems with A Little Room is that Bay 20 at CarriageWorks is quite the opposite: it’s a vast space. The play quickly becomes lost in it; when not using microphones, the actors’ voices are often hard to hear, but in any case there remains a yawning gap between the performers that’s all the more pronounced when they’re near each other.

Each performer acquits themselves well in their monologues, but the dialogue between them is terribly stilted and unconvincing. This may be intentional; I don’t know. Perhaps it represents the sense of disconnection, of isolation, each woman feels. Really, though, everything about the play is much too drawn out, from the looong opening scene of Miss Place painstakingly wrapping presents (I notice the CarriageWorks website describes A Little Room as ‘a work of immense compression’. I wonder if the author of this blurb was the same master of irony who offered them Bay 20?) through to the numerous false endings that close the show>.

This one has more than a little room for refinement.

A Little Room
Presented by The Living Room Theatre in association with CarriageWorks
Writer/Creator: Michelle St. Anne
Dramaturg: Aarne Neeme
Performers: Gael Ballantyne, Katherine Anderson, Susan Miller & Michelle St Anne
Set and Costume Design: Marissa Dale Johnson
Sound and AV Design: Jared Lewis
Lighting Design: Guy Harding

CarriageWorks
June 24 - July 2