Theatre Review: Sappho ... In 9 Fragments

Sappho … in 9 Fragments. Written and performed by Jane Montgomery Griffiths. Staging by Marion Potts. CUB Malthouse, Melbourne until August 21.

Sometimes being in the audience at the theatre can be an enlightening, entertaining, challenging, thought-provoking, deeply moving and uplifting affair. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, it can be all of these things. Mostly, you count yourself lucky if it’s one of them. Sometimes, you can also sit there wondering what on earth is going on, and I need to confess, straight up, that from the moment it started to the moment it finished, Ms Montgomery Griffiths’ brilliantly performed ode to the poet Sappho went straight over my head. I’m sorry, but it did. I felt it all whiz past me, as I stared balefully at the stage wondering what on earth I’d missed. Had Act One started at 6pm? Was this Act Two? Why was she naked? Where do you go from the purest of human physical forms?

And like falling asleep on a train and waking up – panicked and disorientated – at an instantly unrecognisable locale, I realised that I was in the wrong place – particularly complex when you’re there to write a review. The harder I tried to concentrate, the more hazy it all became. I would grip onto a word, a phrase, a sentence … desperately trying to make sense of it all. What was it trying to say? What was I supposed to feel?

What is that great big box doing taking up almost the entire stage and restricting one of the most singularly adventurous and physically literate actresses in the country to a zillionenth of what might have been possible?

I’m hallucinating! Embellishing! Delirious with the fear of my own dumbness. The starkness of my sudden and confronting illiteracy! I’ve got no idea what she’s talking about. Oh, wait. Gaps. I am the gap. The gap. Gap. Gap between what? And what? The gap between all this wonderfully clever writing and acting and my power of even fundamental comprehension. She’s in love with someone who’s gorgeous and … oh, now she’s a nasty bossy nasty piece of work. I think. Maybe.

Biscuit tin. Now I am in a biscuit tin. I visualise a biscuit tin – one with a particularly pretty embossed tableau of some sweet, snow-bound English village like the ones you buy really cheaply at Coles at Christmas Time to have on standby for when friends drop by and have a Christmas present for you and you don’t have one for them. God!

This Sappho is everything! … and she has a beautiful coat.

I’m clever enough, I think, to know that the play is going to finish when the honey has all dripped out of the box and onto the stage. I have to keep telling myself it’s honey, because my poor little over-zealous imagination is beginning to imagine it’s something else. But nothing prepared me for the meat-tray.

I leave the theatre with my platonic plus one and we wander, destroyed and disillusioned, off into whatever remains of our ordinary little, happier lives.

It’s been five days and it’s still no clearer … but I did go to Borders and try to buy a book I’ve always wanted to read: The Death of Socrates. Or Plato. One of them. They don’t have it in stock! I’ve failed again. I will be cleverer! This intoxicating Sappho would expect nothing less. Would she?

Pictured: Jane Montgomery Griffith in Sappho. Photographed by Jeff Busby.