Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > The Performance

The plot of this novel is simple (and sparse) – while bushfires rage nearby and the City is struck by extreme heat, three women watch a theatre production of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days” (which features a woman buried to her waist and later in waste).

The execution though is complex (and rich). The novel is divided (like the production of the play) into two uneven parts – the first much longer – and divided by an interval. In the first half each of the three women has two ordered sections (ordered in a collated fashion) – each effectively entirely set in their thoughts as they watch the play: in the second they have one section each following the same order. Their thoughts are often sparked by the words spoken – or by the characters’ predicaments - in the play – although each of them is pre-occupied with wider thoughts and so alert for the, often painful, resonances on stage.

Even more cleverly the only dialogue in the play is in the interval and is presented as a play, which Clare Thomas attributes to herself, with the three women (and a few others) as characters whose lives briefly interact – their interactions then acting as a third influence on their interior monologues in the second half, during which each grows in their understanding of their own thoughts and possible ways forward.

The three women are all of different ages:

Margot – around 60 – a successful and much loved Professor of English Literature (albeit not particularly knowledgeable about Beckett or the play – as a subscriber she has attended without knowing the play). She faces a number of crises in her life: her husband is suffering from dementia with difficult implications both physically and mentally (as she is forced to consider if his actions now represent long suppressed feelings); hints are being dropped at work about the unwelcome prospect of retirement; and her relationship with her son (and his wife and young son) are being complicated by her projection onto them of her own ambivalence of motherhood and the break it put on her career.

Summer – in her early 20s – is working as an Usher to supplement her income. She is potentially of mixed race (her white mother will not discuss her father’s identity). On one level she has her life on the bohemian trajectory she aimed for – quirky friends, a tattoo artist girlfriend, a shared house in an on-trend neighbourhood, a drama degree – but is burdened by a debilitating sense of anxiety about the trajectory of society – her anxiety not assisted as her girlfriend’s parents house is in the path of the fires.

Ivy – in her 40s – is a wealthy philanthropist – being woo-ed by the theatre for donations. A Beckett-groupie when a brilliant English literature student, she is attending the theatre with her best friend, while her second husband looks after her second child – her back story being very difficult.

I did not know the Beckett play before I read the book – but very early on I read some fairly detailed plot summaries and also watched some excerpts of online productions of the play: I would strongly suggest you do both to get a feel for the play and for the character’s experience - and if time permits I suspect watching the whole play would add even more.

The author though (naturally through the characters thoughts) does set out much of the plot and key dialogue lines and also (equally naturally) draws out copious links between the play and the lives and thoughts of the women, as well as the wider environmental background on which the play is being performed (and which is a pre-occupation of the “eco-feminist” director). These links are on both: a macro level (a play about a woman oddly trapped in which we observe her stream of consciousness which is a mix of the banal and the profound, the immediate/trivial and the longer-term/far-reaching as she struggles for meaning in her life); and on micro level with of course the lines in the play which most closely mirror or challenge each woman’s thoughts being those that strike home and on which they remark.

I really thought this was beautifully observed and thoroughly enjoyable novel – the contrivance at its centre is exactly that (contrived) but in way which for me added to, rather than distracted from, its themes and message.

Highly recommended.