People Will Think You Don’t Love Me

LITTLE TROJAN do a great job dressing up their new play for its opening performance. The theatre looks good, the play is solidly set and lit on the two-sided stage, and there’s a fine program to be read, the first time in years that a small theatre has offered such an important ingredient.

People Will Think You Don’t Love Me, a world premiere by Joanne Erskine, is a three-handed, two-hour play (with no interval) about a man who has been given a newly transplanted heart and the effect this has on his loyal wife, and on the woman who was once partner to the donor.

Michael (Tom Matthews) is given the transplanted heart, after years of worry and declining health, particularly lately. His wife Liz (Grace Naoum) has stuck by him. They have no children, but she sees the newly invigorated Michael as the start of possibilities, of a new family.

Meanwhile, lost in a fog of grief, Tommy (Ruby Maishman) can’t even touch the boxes of her dead boyfriend’s possessions that strew her Sydney flat. She gradually comes out of this cloud of depression and faces Michael, who seems to have taken on some of her lost mate’s edgy behaviour.

The three performances hit exactly the right notes. Tom Matthews’ Michael is spot on as he tries to explain the new person who is inhabiting his body. His playing the piano so forcefully is a plus.

Grace Naoum does everything to understand and then to condemn her husband for his behaviour. I signed on to Michael, she says, but not to this new person who seems to have arrived in his place.

Ruby Maishman is excellent as the left-out one. At first bereft, she slowly returns to clearing the boxes and starting a new life with Michael. Or does she? In this ‘metaphor for everyone who’s ever grown or evolved in life’ it’s an open bet.

Beautifully directed by Jules Billington, the play just rolls along on its epic two-hour course, with Production Design by Sam Wylie.

Written with care and precision by Joanna Erskine, it touches and informs. And fascinates.

Frank Hatherley

Photographer: Phil Erbacher