The Bull, The Moon & the Coronet of Stars by Van Badham | Directed By Heidi Manché

In simple form, this play is the story of a woman looking for love, and the winding path she takes to finding her final safety in the arms of an unexpected suitor. It is also a contemporary interpretation of the life and times of the Cretan princess Ariadne, who, as the story goes, was abandoned by a King but ultimately married a God.

Image + cover image: Stephen Henry

New all-female The Hive Collective are presenting this as the first in a triptych of plays by female authors, with female directors, each going up at Metro Arts over the next month. This first instalment is directed by the talented Heidi Manché, and it appears to be supported by an all-female producing team at Metro as well, which is all delightful enough to be worth mentioning.

Sarah Ogden (Marian) and Rob Pensalfini (Michael/Mark) both gave superb performances, they are truly clever actors. Although I struggled to feel affection for any of the characters, they were masterfully played, and the live on-stage soundtrack of keyboard, box drum and more by Shenzo Gregorio added a fantastic level of stage tension. The narration was presented almost as if two people were animatedly telling an anecdote at a dinner party, with animated hands and acting out the best parts. They were telling stories about themselves in the third person, an unusual way of storytelling that I’ve not often seen on the stage.

Image: Stephen Henry

I struggled with the oversexed language and harsh physical descriptors, written in the style of a panting Tom Robbins-esque holiday romance. It was far too many thrusts and round breasts & sweaty licks for me to ever really relax into the risqué character flirtation, but I felt that may be a generational thing, as the relatively-on-average-older audience seemed delighted, with laughter ringing out throughout. To be honest, it almost reminded me of those threads were male writers write women badly – they are always round and pert and plump, all heaving breasts and summer dresses, or they are thin and sharp and sticky. It was story-telling, entertainment – these weren’t whole people being presented, they were rough sketches, vivid memories made live. The excessive shame felt by the protagonist was uncomfortable and felt dated – surely in this day and age we can dust ourselves off after a mistimed affair?

I am a mere handful of years younger than our playwright and I recognised the tropes enough to know them for what they were – the blue summer dress, the man-hungry vixen, the affair that misfires when a younger woman throws herself at an attractive married man, his classic retreat to the wife, the larrikin who successfully woos the broken-hearted self-imposed-abstinent woman (he “knows about women”). These are the stories that filled a hundred novels when I was a voraciously-read teen and I think I liked them better then than I do now. My younger friend did not recognise them as tropes, having not grown up on the same pseudo-sexist sitcoms, novellas, and endless matching romcoms. The play mocks its characters, the ones performed and the ones imagined, and to be honest this knocked me out of my reverie time and again. Both actors are legit amazing, truly I enjoyed the performances, I just never got comfy with the story and the language. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the stage notes with its rom-com chick-lit signposts.

My favourite moments were the otherworldly scenes where we shifted between the real world and the world of gods and myth. Sarah was mesmerising when fashioned as demigod, filled with seraphic grief or ethereal divinity. 

The play goes for an extraordinary length of time, some hour and forty minutes this run, and was another testament to the skill on stage that they managed to hold us there engaged for the entirety of the time. Clever use of simple white boxes kept the two moving constantly as they moved through museums, trains, resorts, bedrooms, forests, seaside. It was a solid effort, for a licentious piece of writing, that clearly delighted many but may not be to everybody’s taste.