Playing Mad

Writer Eve Langley died in 1974, in a bush hut somewhere in Katoomba. The exact date of her death cannot be pinpointed because she died alone and her body was not found until about three weeks after her death. Her life before that had been tumultuous, often difficult and fraught with the limitations of her gender. As a female artist in the early half of the 20^th century, Langley's artistic ambition and ability had frequently been suppressed by the social expectations of the time. When Langley didn't comply with these expectations she recived accusations of madness. Her own husband had her committed to a mental institution in 1942, the same year her first novel The Pea Pickers was published. She wasn't released until 1949, a full seven years later.

The play Eve, devised and performed by the Nest Ensemble at the Blue Room Theatre, wonders if Eva Langley's perceived madness didn't end up losing Australia the best work of a very talented writer. “The tragedy of Eve's life was that her husband ultimately institutionalised her and abandoned her. And so perhaps the best years of her writing life were kind of lost,” says Leah Mercer, the director of Eve and a co-deviser of the piece. “She had two novels published but she kept writing – even when she was institutionalised, even after she was institutionalised – but she never got published again.”

Margi Brown Ash, who wrote the piece and plays the central character of Eva Langley, spends much of play exploring that grey line between madness and simple eccentricity. “She's definitely asking the audience to, you know, look at someone who's eccentric, or look at what an artist had to do in order to access their creativity,” Mercer says of Brown Ash. “And to look at the idea of somebody who doesn't really belong in a normal conservative society. I think we're much more, for the most part, welcoming nowadays of people's eccentricities, but I think that's sort of what the story is about – it is a story about an outsider.”

Eve is set at the end of Langley's life, the part when she was living along in the bush of Katoomba, but the power of retrospect allows us to travel. “In our play, we sort of move,” Mercer explains. “Yes we're in 1974, but Eve can, with the flick of her fingers, go back in time and travel all around her life. It really is a story of her imagination. The good parts of her imagination; but also sometimes her imagination was so big that it kind of got her into trouble.”

Originally conceived as a one-woman show, Eve has ended up with three characters – a storyteller, a musician, and Eva Langley herself. The focus is on Langley, however, and it's Margie Brown Ash's performance that drives the play. “The development of it into three people was to generate more of that tension and more of that dialogue. Even though it's mostly Eve's story, the other characters – the musician and the storyteller – are there to facilitate her telling that story,” Mercer explains. “So the tension I think comes from the story. It's a really dramatic [and] heightened emotional piece.”