kerosene and SIRENS

This double bill (you can see one or both) of two powerful monologues take us into the hearts of troubled isolated people.  On completely bare stages, they tell us their stories, evoking their worlds and their feelings.  Such is the skill of Benjamin Nichol’s writing, that our sympathies ebb and flow as we understand – often more than his characters do. 

In the first play, kerosene, Izabella Yena gives a riveting, quicksilver performance as a wayward misfit schoolgirl, a fierce, smart-arse pugnacious tomboy (is that term still permissible?) who is nevertheless touching, even loveable.  She’s almost an orphan, living with her old Grandad.  She looks after herself.  As she says, ‘Who knew a girl would fight back?’ 

Millie loves her BFF Annie – but she wouldn’t and doesn’t use that word.  Annie is a complete contrast to Millie – groomed, pretty, the almost cliché boy magnet who puts herself around.  But Annie doesn’t judge Millie as just about everyone else does, doesn’t see Millie as some sort of freak.  Annie loves Millie too, but they’ll never be a as close as Millie would like… Ironically, it is Millie who’s resilient, indomitable, able to invent herself anew and survive – even somewhere alien.  There is no reward for unrequited love.  As the two women grow up and drift apart, Millie getting on with life, Annie almost inevitably falls into bad trouble with the wrong shithead man... 

Izabella Yena, aided by Harrie Hogan’s superb, emotive lighting, creates the characters her story needs with remarkable economy – Annie herself, Grandpa, the school bullies whom Millie vanquishes, the woman at the servo – with a change of voice, a move, a gesture.  Yena co-directs with Benjamin Nichol and they bring out all there is to find in his text.

In the second piece, SIRENS, co-directed by Nichol and Olivia Satchell, Nichol plays Eden, another misfit, in a dead-and-alive coastal town.  As with Yena in kerosene, Nichol creates a multitude of characters – so brilliantly it’s startling.  Eden is a part time cleaner, looking for gay hook-ups on the net, self-destructive, self-hating, living with an indifferent Dad and a Christian Mum, who sings beautifully – and weirdly, Eden sings with her.  A combination made (almost) believable since Nichol sings beautifully himself.  Things look like one dead end after another – Eden is too hopeless and shiftless to get up and leave – until he meets a remarkable visitor.  Stylish, cultured David… and new vistas open.  In its way, SIRENS is a chamber piece film noir. 

But if kerosene perhaps works rather better that SIRENS, it’s because we love Millie and the story, with its strong narrative, is driven by love.  Despite an amazing performance (the equal per se of Yena’s) from Nichol, we feel pity rather than love for Eden and the story, a few beats too long, is driven by a delusion the end of which we see long before he does.

I had seen kerosene with Yena as Millie before – at Theatre Works in the lockdown days when we watched shows from inside Perspex boxes and she had to play to an audience on four sides.  It was an award-winning performance all the same – and yet here at fortyfivedownstairs, it’s even better.  With no hindrances, every word, every nuance is clear and goes straight to the heart.  If you think you’ve seen kerosene, see it again.  SIRENS too has played before – but at the Trades Hall in the Fringe, in an unfortunate room with a noisy show next door.  See it again too in these ideal conditions. 

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Darren Gill