Image: Simon Pynt
The overriding impression left after watching The One, performed by Georgia King and Mark Storen, is that it’s the Country & Western version of ‘I found my love, I lost my love, and I just don’t know what to do… love is a losing hand’ set in Perth, Western Australia instead of down-home southern USA.
Storen, who with a guitar slung across his body epitomises this country and western singer, plays a 40 year old man who has had trouble committing. Now that all his friends are married he is pretty keen to marry ‘the one’ he has recently discovered. He gets down on one knee and proposes, and she says no, exclaiming that marriage is a way of turning women into property. This subversive take on marriage can only end badly.
The performance is both written and directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler, the Associate Director at Black Swan State Theatre Company and the 2013 Martin Sims Award winner for Minnie and Mona Play Dead. Fowler’s other successful works include FAG/STAG, winner of the Melbourne Fringe Award, Elephents, and Hope is the Saddest, a Perth Fringe World winner which toured to the New York Fringe Festival.
The One had an outing for Perth Fringe Festival earlier this year at the Blue Room. A two hander, it features barely any props (apart from the guitar and a very portentous wedding dress hanging off the back wall) and relies on good acting skills. The actors are clearly comfortable in their roles. Storen is consistent and good at portraying hipster love. King beautifully manages the nuances from awkwardly watching him play love songs to the intensity of the last part of the play very well.
With some great one liners – ‘alcohol has dilated their hearts’ and ‘dressed like an avant-garde pavlova’ – there is a certain cynicism about love in this work. The device of moving from third person narrator to first person acting does not always work – ‘he prepares a proposal that they should enter into an arrangement…he didn’t quite know how to pop it’ …. to… ‘hey we should get married’. She responds with the history of marriage and how women were traded; inheritance tax, property; entailments; legitimising rape and slavery, with his response undercutting philosophical arguments by stating ‘I’m not going to make you do any more chores if we get married’. The man declares ‘he’s never met a woman who didn’t want to get married – it just didn’t happen’, highlighting today’s sexual stereotyping, and then moves into caveman nightmares. Fowler brilliantly captures huge feelings like ‘the big quiet’ in a relationship or ‘is this the end… the end that swing from nowhere and just decimate and attack… the end is raising its head and attacking’.
Overall it feels like hipness is more important than love in The One, and strumming a guitar throughout the whole performance is part of that hip look. There is a coolness about intimacy that permeates the work, and it’s not clear whether this is Perth-reflective or rock star reflective. The guitar playing has some very repetitive structures and spoken word over the strumming monotones and it’s possible that this is meant to emphasise rituals around marriage.
Like all good writers, Fowler has put his pen to this ongoing dilemma and concludes: ‘marriage is a promise that you’ll work on falling in love when you fall out of love’. King and Storen do good stuff with this material and the blues either cements the story or somewhat distracts, depending on your capacity to hear the storyline through the music.
Rating: 3 ½ stars out of 5
The One
Written and Directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler
Performed by Georgia King and Mark Storen
Produced by Whiskey & Boots
Staged Managed by Rhiannon Petersen
As part of the Subiaco Theatre Festival, 7 June – 1 July at Subiaco Arts Centre
7–10 June 2017
