In Australian playwright Maxine Mellor’s new play ‘Anna Robi and The House Of Dogs’, Anna Robi is a ditzy young woman who lives with her frail, ill , demanding mother in their squalid suburban home. The house looks like a bomb has hit. Sheets of old newspaper are littered over the apartment. Dog faeces are hidden underneath the sheets. Anna shares the same bed as her mother. For one thing, she can’t use her own bed upstairs as one of their two dogs sleeps in it! Amongst all this chaos, Anna’s thoughts are on finding a man and losing her virginity!
Fractured relationships between parents, particularly single parents, and adult children, who are still living with them, have proved to be fertile soil for playwrights to work with. Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s brilliant play ‘The Beauty Queen Of Leenane’ memorably comes to mind.
As with McDonagh’s play, Mellor and her director Iain Sinclair, together with two great leads, Jeanette Cronin and Stefanie Smith, have come up with one of those ‘I don’t know whether to laugh or cry’ nights at the theatre. At the heart of the play is a huge tug of war as the two women desperately try to get their needs met.
Jeanette Cronin’s mum is a manipulative woman who is desperate that her daughter stays living with her. Stefanie Smith’s Anna is desperate to break free and to explore her sexuality with a man, rather than for it to be mocked by her mother.
With its depiction of characters using coarse language and operating at a fairly base level, this show will mainly appeal to those who like their drama rough and ready, edgy and confronting.
A co-production of House Of Dogs with Tamarama Rock Surfers, Maxine Mellor’s ‘Anna Robi and The House Of Dogs’ opened on Wednesday 17th November and runs till Sunday 12th December, 2010 at the Old Fitzroy theatre, 129 Dowling Street, Woolloomooloo.
