In this fast-paced, chameleonic series of monologues, the protagonist begins life as a frenzied mother,and leaves us as a streetwise yet fragile cabaret star.During the two-and-a-half hours between, she plays a narcissistic talent quest hopeful, a cacti-obsessed ex-wife,a doubtful bogan bride and a widow who re-discovers her sexuality.
What?Yes, you read it right. Sharon Millerchip talks, dances and croons her way through no fewer than six roles in playwright Joanna Murray-Smith’s one-woman show, Bombshells.
At the play’s heart, lies the question: what does it mean to be a woman in twenty-first century Western society? How should we be thinking about gender roles?How do we measure society’s expectations against our own? How do we manage our ideals in the face of our disappointments?
When the lights first shine on Millerchip, she is Meryl: struggling to drag her weary body out of bed to attend to her newborn. The next fifteen or so minutes represent a day in her manic life as an over-stretched, married mother. As she shops, vacuums and ferries her children about, we are privy to her constant self-interrogation. Is she a good mother? A sufficiently loving wife?Fit enough?Witty enough?
The pace slows with the second monologue and the emergence of Tiggy, spot lit on a dark stage. A shattered romantic desperate for the return of her unfaithful husband, she delivers a panegyric to cactus, rich with sexual innuendo. Murray-Smith’s writing skates the brink between comedy and sadness, provoking our laughter in our acknowledgement of the familiar, then catching us unawares with sudden moments of pathos.
Millerchip’s capacity to slide from one character to another, establishing the distinctiveness of each both verbally and physically, is impressive. It is easy to forget that it’s the work of just one actor.
While the third monologue is perhaps the weakest, for its lack of subtlety, the second half of the show builds to a rapturous finale. Millerchip has us in stitches as a champagne sculling bride, cynical yet desirous to be “wanted”; hanging on every word as a philosophical widow who becomes physically involved with a blind student several decades her junior; and enthralled by her singing and dancing as an eccentric, lovelorn, outrageously flirtatious German front lady. With their combined talents, Joanna Murray-Smith, Sharon Millerchip and director Sandra Bates had the Ensemble Theatre crowd on their feet by the night’s end – no easy feat for a one
