Blair's Reviews > The Performance

Three women – Margot, early 70s, a professor; Ivy, early 40s, a wealthy philanthropist; and Summer, a twentysomething drama student – watch a performance of the Samuel Beckett play Happy Days in a Melbourne theatre. They each contemplate their own lives as well as (particularly in Summer’s case) the devastating bushfires blazing outside. The book is cleverly structured in three sections to match the acts of the play, with conversations during the interval, when the characters encounter one another, rendered as a script.

I found it uneven, mainly because Margot is a much more interesting character than the other two. There’s so much that’s fascinating about her ruminations, so much I wanted to explore further: her lifelong ambivalence about motherhood; unwelcome nudges towards retirement from her boss; the problem of her husband’s incipient dementia, which has turned him occasionally violent. Meanwhile, I can remember very little about Ivy without referring back to the book. And I’m afraid almost nothing about Summer worked for me – she’s totally unconvincing and her ‘climate anxiety’ is so clumsily rendered that it repeatedly made me cringe. (To be fair, after reading Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun, any other novel that attempts to approach this topic is automatically on the back foot; it feels pointless that anyone else should even try.) I would have preferred The Performance had it focused primarily on Margot; by including two other main characters, the story spreads its many themes far too thinly, and its treatment of most of them ends up feeling superficial.

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