Honour thyself
Woman finds herself after husband hooks up with younger woman
Barb Stewart

Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith may not be breaking new ground with Honour, but her intelligent and articulate work presents an engaging take on an age-old topic.

Honour (Elizabeth Sheppard) is an intelligent, middle-aged British woman who put a promising future as a poet on hold to be a full-time wife to her newspaper-columnist husband, George (John Gilbert), and mother to her daughter Sophie (Daria Puttaert). Honour and George have a strong if slightly stale marriage. They are content with the life they have together, and neither questions the authenticity of their 32-year union.

Of course, this wouldn’t be much of a play if a spanner wasn’t thrown into the works, and the spanner in this particular case is Claudia (Thea Gill), a 28-year-old biographer who cunningly woos the rather sad-willed George with her physical and intellectual charms.

While George feels perfectly obliged to follow a new life of passion with a woman half his age (and only a few years older than his daughter), Honour is left reeling at his sudden and pathetically explained need to end their life together. But even when her life changes in a mere moment, Honour moves forward, not

wallowing in bitterness or rage but gloriously

discovering a self that may have been lost but for this upheaval.

George, on the other hand, becomes lost in a Freudian nightmare with a woman who admits (to Honour) that she wanted to have parents just like Honour and George. Claudia wants George to teach her about Nietzsche and praise her manuscripts — and while the rest of us shudder, George laps it up like an attention-starved puppy.

Steel-hearted Claudia actually says that she acted in order to liberate Honour, and in many ways that’s true. As the play unfolds, Honour transforms both spiritually and physically into the woman she once was. As she comes into a life of her own, without need of George, even her hair and clothing become sleeker and more sophisticated. Murray-Smith’s intelligent, insightful and dialogue-heavy script is brilliantly interpreted by the cast — especially Sheppard, whose steely character anchors the whole play — and skilled director Brian Richmond.

Brian Perchaluk’s awe-inspiring set, two huge Henry Moore-esque sculptures representing a male and female, is a wonder, and John Mills-Cockell’s sound design means each scene opens with snippets of previous dialogue drifting through the air. The combination of the two makes for a wonderfully dramatic atmosphere.

Honour may not be the most original work ever penned for the stage, but its execution offers some gifted insights and wonderful performances that make the work a fresh and exciting affair.