Reviewed by David Smith
February 2015
Tony Moore’s No Privacy, a sensitive and poignant examination of the life of a street person, couldn’t have found a better setting than the Sunken Garden at the Holden Street Theatres. The audience arrived to take our seats under the verandah of the former manse, to discover the street person, played by Joanna Webb, asleep on a bench on a paved area of a tousled native garden. It was a striking opening.
Webb’s monologue, delivered directly to the audience in the intimacy of the garden, took us through her character’s own experiences and reasons for her current state. She was a middle-class, slightly fussy woman, fallen on hard times. As such she represented in a very credible way the causes for such women finding themselves in that dire predicament.
One of the strengths of the presentation was that the character seemed so ordinary, holding basically decent values, yet living a life more often associated with violence and danger. Webb brought empathy and credibility to the performance, using the script’s local, familiar Adelaide touchstones to very good effect. The piece was firmly grounded by such revelations as the best places around town to find shelter, food, and hot and cold running water.
In a nice point of planning, dusk began enclosing the garden as she finished packing her trolley and moved off in search of a safe place for the night.
This was a gentle yet resilient person in tough circumstances, well realised by a strong script, subtly performed.
