Joan Marie Review
ATYP’s reviewing program was created to give young people a platform to voice their opinions and experiences while developing skills in critical reflection. The views expressed are those of the writer and do not reflect the views of ATYP or its staff.
Ava Jenkin & Evie Lane in Joan Marie, 2024. Photo By Brontë Godden – SUDS x Sydney Fringe
9.9.2024
Joan Marie is a debut work from director and writer Anastasia Dale. This show in many ways seemed like a candle burning at both ends, a constant circling, chasing and reinventing of itself. The play pursues Joan and Marie just as they pursue each other during a tender and fleeting 55-minute-long conversation that scales both domestic and epic terrain.
The staging is simple, a timeless apartment with a kitchen stove and a velvet couch. The set design by Erin Murphy in many ways acts as a realistic anchor for this two-handed play to soar with what was its most keen strength, its lavish dialogue.
The writing in this play invites the audience on a journey of epic proportions, through the lens of Dale’s rich and sensorial text we witness Joan and Marie embody many lives of different women across many different eras of time together. It was as if these two characters themselves were putting on a private play just for them to explore the many queer women of history, art and folklore, until eventually sharing their own stories with each other as Joan and as Marie.
Ava Jenkin & Evie Lane in Joan Marie, 2024. Photo By Brontë Godden – SUDS x Sydney Fringe
The lighting design by Luna Ng in turn acts as a kind of emotional flush of primary colours at times, or more naturalistic in moments helping to tune the audience’s focus, providing a gentle abstraction that cradles Dale’s equally colourful and fluid text.
The pulse of this play is of course the two actors who portray Joan and Marie. Joan is played by Ava Jenkins, who was utterly captivating in her ease with such dynamic text from Dale. Marie, played by Evie Lane was entirely endearing – eliciting many knowing giggles from the audience. The pair worked well together as opposites but equals, a sun and a moon, always destined, always returning to each other time and time again.
★★★
— Lily Thomson