Reviewed by Malcolm Calder
My Brilliant Divorce
By Geraldine Aron
Dir Janice Finn
With Jackie Clarke
Tadpole Productions
Pumphouse Theatre, Takapuna
to 25 May
Review by Malcolm Calder
16 May 2024
As a mere male, I feel something of a fraud attempting to review something that tackles its subject entirely from a woman’s perspective. But, rest assured, I have sought the opinions of female friends, so plough on (in truth ARE thoughts for menfolk in the work too).
Geraldine Aron’s play tracks one woman’s three-year path through a pending divorce after 20 or so years of marriage. It is ripe for many emotional, social and potentially dangerous situations and that’s no bad thing. In fact Aron’s script largely treats them as a self-deprecatingly comedic and the twinkling sparkle and dry self-observations of Jackie Clarke helps ensure this is the case – although not without some truly heart-rending moments along the way.
There is occasional recognition of Aron’s truths, but the laughter flows, there are giggles galore and it is these spoonfuls of sugar that help ease the shock, the pain, the anxiety and the self-doubt – embarrassingly so at times.
While Aron’s stereotypically deserted wife reflects with shredded self-esteem, loneliness and self-induced neuroses, she finds little support around her. Older family members prefer to look to their own future with generational glee, children don’t look back too hard because they are focussed on other things, while men wish to pursue their new path clearly preferring glitz and glam (and youth of course, now THERE’S a stereotype). And when the loyalty of her hitherto best friend the delightful Dexter wavers, she hits rock bottom.
In sum, My Brilliant Divorce portrays a women who has thought of herself as ‘provided for’ until she isn’t. And then discovers her own future right in front of her.
Initially Jackie Clarke’s Angela Kennedy Lipsky came across as a little tense and a tad overly-quick with her delivery on Opening Night, but she soon grew into the character, quickly found her comic timing and really started to make the most of some of Aron’s delicious lines. In fact, the way her girl-koala demolished her boy-koala (both longtime gifts from her ex), there was real venom behind it and even Dexter looked startled. Even the audience lapped it up when she crawled off-stage looking for the bits.
Self-doubt is at the core of this play. In one or two places it seemed a little dated and some of the localisations didn’t quite work, but that didn’t matter. The audience intuitively knew it would all work out for the best in the long run. Far be it for me provide a spoiler alert though.
Finally, congratulations once again to Tadpole, a company that knows and understands its audience rather well, and keeps coming up with productions to which they can relate. That’s not to suggest the opening night audience for My Brilliant Career was stacked with divorcees. Far from it. In fact I have a feeling that many were there largely because of Jackie Clarke’s presence on stage.
