Oliver Rynn, Roger Smith, and Ryan Henry in Through a Beaded Lash; Photo by Clare Hawley.
Adam, with his friend and employee Zoe, are packing up the remains of his once fabulous gay bookshop. After 25 years Adam has sold the bookshop to a developer, so he and Zoe are moving on – though Adam is finding the process of letting go much harder. Through a Beaded Lash cuts between the present day bookshop and 1980s Sydney, when the gay community is in the grip of the Aids epidemic.
The script is funny, enjoyable and nuanced; there’s an amusing moment when Adam (Leo Domigan) brings six coffees for Zoe (Cherilyn Price) rather than admitting that, after 25 years of friendship, he doesn’t know what kind of coffee she drinks.
But the dialogue leaves too much unexplained. Brent (Ryan Henry) is an eighties drag queen who inadvertently brings Zoe and Adam together. A snippet of dialogue hints that he did something awful to Zoe, but frustratingly we never find out what that is.
In fact the flashbacks to the eighties end when Adam and Zoe become friends. We see them meet and we see them drunk bonding. But that’s it, and there remains little insight into the rest. They buried a lot of friends, including Brent, who all died of Aids.
While the choice not to detail their life together during this middle period may have been missed because it seems more mundane, there was no opportunity to see drama unfolding or to see how these characters dealt with the tough moments. As an aside, Oliver Ryan (Young Adam) is brilliant in the scene where his character is high. That was one of the most compelling, watchable scenes in the play.
Plays like Angles in America, The Band Played On and Holding the Man have covered this important topic in depth and it’s difficult to know if Through A Beaded Lash offers much that’s new on this subject. It’s an enjoyable tale though for such difficult subject matter, and there are some fun lines of dialogue that the actors obviously enjoy delivering.
The younger cast are especially strong with Ryan Henry (Brent) and Emily McGowan (Young Zoe) stand out performers. The eighties costumes, green eyeshadow and BIG hair will evoke instant nostalgia for anyone alive in that era.
The Depot Theatre isn’t a comfortable one with no air con and low flying planes that suddenly obscure several lines of dialogue. But that didn’t bother the packed crowd on opening night.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Through A Beaded Lash
Written by Robert Allan
Director Julie Baz
Cast Leo Domigan, Ryan Henry, Emily McGovan, Cherilyn Price, Oliver Ryan, Roger Smith
David Jeffrey Set & Lighting Design
Depot Theatre 25 November – 12th December
