To fill their theatres, managers and festival organisers are continually under pressure to dumb down. Not so at the Kalk Bay Theatre. Proprietors, Simon and Helen Cooper, over the years have regularly presented cryptic work of high artistic merit. Performer, Shirley Kirchmann has followed suit. Her last show was the exoteric Train Your Man. She returns now with the esoteric Junkie.
In a fifty-minute solo physical theatre performance, Kirchmann, from the perspective of Alice, a girl desperately trying to keep herself and her home together, lays bare the bedlam of a dysfunctional family. The father gambles, losing his earnings and the occasional winnings; the mother is a catatonic drunk; her brother, who also sexually abuses Alice, keeps running away. There is no linear narrative; the play, like Alice, is trapped in endless repetition, until she bravely makes her escape.
Alice phlegmatically asks the audience: “So you want to be entertained?” Something Kirchmann is refusing to do. Dramatically this can works to a point. But after thirty minutes, the audience starts to win the argument. The ‘play’ is in form and expression an allegory for Alice’s desperate situation, enacting rather than relating the situation.
It is high risk to create theatre eschewing pathos, only fleetingly approached here through snippets of a Chopin nocturne. However, Kirchmann does resolve her intentions artistically. The result is a crisp, well-executed performance, high in concept.
Junkie is a performance piece that could be staged as well in an art gallery. This bold, brave and solid work deserves an audience.
