Image: miff.com.au
A few years ago, American-born, Melbourne-based playwright Lally Katz found herself in a bit of a pickle. As a kid, Katz swore off romantic love believing that if she found love, she wouldn’t be able to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. Now an adult, life was collecting on that Faustian bargain just as she meets a special someone (known only as the “full Jew”, the chap in question has a lisp and wrote a book set in Mississippi – you do the maths). Meanwhile, she was failing to come up with the goods on a commissioned play about the global financial crisis, and was in for about a thousand dollars with Cookie, a New York City psychic that had Katz convinced that she was cursed.
So, in collaboration with Belvoir Theatre, she did what any decent artist does: she spun it into theatre gold, taking acclaimed Australian actress Robyn Nevin along for the ride. The result was Stories I Want to Tell You in Person, a fourth-wall breaking, layered meta-narrative about Katz’s misadventures in the psychic, fiscal and creative realms.
This year’s Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) program sees this highly acclaimed work adapted for the screen with the same idiosyncratic brand of outsider-looking-in neurosis, awash with a sense of humour that walks a very canny line between the absurd and the real.
In a nod to both her first love, and to its previous incarnation on stage, the film adaptation employs some traditional conventions of the theatre to tell its story. Shot in aesthetically minimalist ‘black box’ theatre style, Katz pares back the story-telling process to its most basic elements. It’s a disarming device that draws us in to her kooky world, and invites us to accept the casually absurd (“A few years ago, I met a Canadian cowboy in the park when he accidentally lassoed me early one morning…”).
But the film adaptation is more than a rehashing of the stage show; Katz takes us past the show’s ending point with an epilogue that reveals an opening night drama in which the curse rears its ugly head once more.
Even though she’s not really a performer – though she did once play a rabbit in Ralph Myers’ Frankenstein – Katz clearly relishes the experience. And then there is the question of whether there is enough mileage for yet another adaptation; some critics considered the original an indulgent in-joke, too niche to be of interest to anyone outside a close circle of theatre patrons.
But casting herself as the star pays off, and the soliloquy format manages to be both confessional and absurd. It is as if by sheer sleight of hand that we suspend disbelief long enough to accept the larger than life character before us – how does an adult woman find herself in these situations? Can the ingénue shtick be real? But the device actually reveals more than it hides; entering Katz’ world casts a very particular magic over things, and she reminds us that performance and story telling are profound acts of intimacy.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Stories I Want to Tell You in Person
By Lally Katz
Directed by Erin White
Melbourne International Film Festival
Tuesday 4 August
Sunday 16 August
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