Blue Christmas

New Ghosts Theatre Company’s IGNITE Collective initiative presents their first production, Blue Christmas, a double bill of new works, Good People and Shandy’s Corner.

In Katy Warner’s Good People, a group of six high school friends are in an unnamed foreign airport waiting anxiously for their flight home. Their exact location, a tropical paradise, is purposefully unclear and dislocated, the site of an unnamed disaster. Was it a natural disaster, like the Boxing Day tsunami? Was it an accidental explosion? Was it a terrorist attack? The women don’t know. They panicked and ran to save themselves. Phone signal is down and the armed men guarding the airport won’t give them any information. Questions arise: should they stay and help? How can they go back home and keep living their normal lives?

While the women's circumstances are meant to inspire anxiety in the characters and tension in the narrative, they leave the audience a little confused and bored. On a mostly bare stage reminiscent of an airport gate, the characters each respond differently to the crisis, revealing their different perspectives and histories with one another. While clever on the surface, most of the action is really a kind of repetitive sparring. The characters lack the multi-dimensionality needed to take them seriously. This being said, Jane Watt’s stage presence is off-kilter and warming. Her do-gooder, white yogi character trope is offset by her innate ability to laugh at herself. Clementine Anderson works magic. She grounds a piece that is otherwise difficult to invest in. Her tone and vocal work are crucial to the limited success of Good People. 

In Gretel Vella’s Shandy’s Corner, Shandy (Zoe Jensen) and Camille (Harriet Gordon-Anderson) prepare dinner at the dining table for Christmas. They are at a women’s shelter, Shandy’s Corner, and good-naturedly argue about why Shandy is cooking a complicated Nigella Lawson chicken recipe instead of something from the no-muss no-fuss Jamie Oliver. The heavily pregnant Edith (Clementine Anderson) is welcomed by Shandy’s too-high spirits and Camille’s husky evenness. What follows is a story of abuse and resilience, of coming together in the face of violence.

Aided by Lucy Clements’ direction, each character is so well-realised that the audience feels like they're in an actual shelter. The work is all the more impactful because of its focus on the lives of survivors, set against the reality that 54 women have died as the result of male violence in Australia this year. Gordon-Anderson’s Camille is a matriarch whose power is her compassion. The first image on the stage is her slicing an apple, controlled and precise. Throughout the show that sense of control colours her actions. Her tone is easygoing but resonates with an earned authority. Gordon-Anderson's performance alone warrants buying a ticket. Anderson’s characterisation of Edith builds, slow and steady, to a monologue about domestic violence in relationships. Jensen imbues Shandy’s over-the-top good intentions with a hilarious lack of self-awareness. When Edith says she doesn’t like to be touched, Jensen good-spiritedly promises her she’ll soon force her way into her affections — it’s a moment of painfully intelligent cringe. Meg Clarke’s Lizzie is a rambunctious younger woman with a criminal history and a delinquent’s charm. Her zealous sincerity and insistence on musical dance breaks to lighten the mood balances the sensitivity of the subject matter. The final moments gesture towards catharsis without letting the audience entirely off the hook.

Shandy’s Corner is a heart-rending and politically vocal work that outshines Good People. IGNITE Collective’s Blue Christmas highlights how difficult it is to make new work, the ambition of independent theatre, and the high calibre work New Ghosts is capable of.