Theatre review: Silent Night, Raging Eve

Jon Gower

There’s an aching loneliness at the heart of this madcap, energetic, sometimes frantic show. Lonely heart Eve is frantically trying to engineer a successful Christmas Party that won’t follow the by now two-decades long tradition of cloying predictability.

There’s the relative, John who keeps on suggesting board games and the grandmother who only wants to watch more soaps. And then there’s Janice, her bete noir, who makes us ask why on earth she invites her year on year.

Eve has dutifully sourced the usual sausage rolls, cooked up the quiches and selected all the festive discs, including The Drifters and Elaine Page. She’s decorated a chair to match the sofa, although the colours are just a tad out of kilter. Sadly, nothing whatsoever seems to go right for her.

Festive jalfrezi

The mundanity of the mince pies and the festive jalfrezi waiting on the kitchen stove are far removed from the glamour Eve so clearly loves and so desperately seeks. For Eve loves Hollywood stars, dotes on the escapism of film and her home is full of photographs of a bygone, shinier age. In life she’s a frustrated Yorkshire woman: in her dreams she is Gloria Swanson or meets Latin lover Rudolph Valentino for a dance in her living room-turned-ballroom.

Joanna Simpkins plays Eve with oodles of manic and festive gusto, her desperation coming through in pretty much every move she makes. She is the epitome of restlessness, of not knowing what to do next. She tells us about the night before the party when a nerve-steadying glass of Malbec turned into a bottle of wine. She talks to the Christmas fairy about the anatomical consequences of being stuck on the top of the tree. Her nerviness and nervousness are engines, driving us on from one recollection about parties past to acts of preparing for the grim awfulness of the latest one, as Eve steels herself for the boredom with guilty swigs of spirits.

Physical show

This being a Volcano production and one directed by Paul Davies, it’s a kinetically physical show as Eve spiders along the walls of her home or shows us how she does her planks, those exercises designed to strengthen her isometric core. There are her calming techniques, too which don’t seem to work that well. She bursts into spirited tango and, once the guests arrive, becomes one supercharged, frenetic host, offering slices of quiche, pulling crackers, eager as beavers to please.

At one point Eve sings a song about staving off the effects of ageing before asking the audience to assess the wrinkles on her brow. At every stage she engages with the audience, turning them into party invitees, witnesses to the achingly sad dissolution of all her party hopes.

Kylie Minogue

There’s one very telling little dance number when Eve shows us how she used to dance to the music of the ‘five foot tall Australian’ Kylie Minogue in the tight confines of her childhood home. She pumps up the energy and throws herself fully into doing her bit of Kylie only to have one of her parents telling her to turn off that music. She is thwarted even in this small childhood pleasure.

This isn’t just about loving Kylie but also about loving the singer’s diminutive height, as Eve herself is is overly tall and part of her reminiscences touch on how she was considered too tall to play Mary in the school nativity but had to play a succession of Jacobs instead. She didn’t get to play Mary Poppins either. Too tall, Eve doesn’t fit in.

Terrible accidents

As you’ll have gathered this is a play in which life’s disappointments mount up and the cumulative sadnesses of Eve’s life threaten to overwhelm. We hear about two boyfriends, both called Steve. The first dies after a terrible accident after Eve gifts him a device for cleaning out the guttering and Steve Two’s end is equally grim. Even Kylie the hamster’s death is grotesque but darkly funny. Because this is very much a dark comedy, with plenty of guffaws punctuating the grimaces.

There’s a lovely, simple coup de theatre at the end of the hour-long show in which Eve transmutes her home into snowfields, or maybe it’s her laying down dust sheets to cocoon everything ready for next year. Or, given the violence which concludes with Eve thrown into the rage of the play’s title, maybe it’s a mausoleum as she finally lays to rest all of the ghosts of Christmas past.

Silent Night, Raging Eve is playing at Volcano Theatre on Swansea High Street until the 20th of December.