Sometimes It's Hot Like The Sun | Imperfect Creatives

Sometimes It’s Hot Like the Sun is a play by Brisbane writers which is published by the ever-delightful stable of Playlab Theatre. Written by Madeleine Border and Honor Webster-Mannison, I both enjoyed a performance of this work staged by Imperfect Creatives and also read a copy of the play, and this response is informed by both experiences.

Image + cover image: Shalyn Knight

From the published forward by Luke Diamond, an original cast member; “Sometimes It’s Hot Like the Sun interrogates how any one person can marry the personal and the political, the global and the individual.” Of course, this is the human condition, the endless dichotomy of insular versus cosmopolitan, the internal narrative and the external character arc. We live inside our buzzing restless dynamic selves, constantly zooming between an endless self-monologue and a half-paranoid and hopelessly misguided understanding of our place in the world, desperate to make our mark and fit in amidst a constant feedback loop of static and sharp breakthroughs of clarity.  

The show opens with a fabulously macabre darkened stage, three actors slumped amid boxes transfixed by a television showing a warp of images, from tangerine skies to violence to static blurred images of ordinary days. A slow burn for the performers over more than fifteen minutes as the audience enters, jostles, collects wine and settles. I wonder idly what kind of reflections pass through their minds each night as they wait in the inbetween zone for us to be seated.

I found in the performance and the deeper reading the play later, a refreshing candour for ugliness. The mother who does not particularly like her kids and is somewhat resigned to such a poor choice made some time before. The lack of self-awareness that occurs when an adult berates a tiny child for social transgressions of which it can scarcely be aware. A wistfulness for an imagined life that was never really pursed with any commitment.

The scenes are diverse in their first, second and third-personhood. The three actors move from scene to scene, sometimes playing three distinct roles, sometimes each playing a facet of a single character, chopping between person and computer-ised ‘other’, moving backwards and forward in time from past experience to the current present, a post-apocalyptic world in which just two people remain. I enjoyed the three moving through each character, presenting facets of one, rather than interactions between many.

Image: Shalyn Knight

It’s weird, its nonsensical, its almost like the kind of things you make up when you freewrite, when you just set the pen on auto and see what flies out. It’s aggressive, and honestly, I don’t even know what wave of feminism we’ve reached but there is a nihilist bent to me that wants to just call it as you see it, as this play in fact does. “I like the taste of stupid on my men.” Says Gerald, a creature that lives in a manhole and eats foolish boys that don’t take a woman at her word.

The opening scene suggests that this is in fact a story about the women who would eat you breakfast – and truly, what kind of woman eats others alive? A hungry woman, or a woman who has nothing to lose. Or perhaps, one cares not what she loses. There is a power in that, an impenetrable security. Its almost zen, that kind of lack of regard.

Image: Shalyn Knight

Dissatisfactory relationships recur often. Flaccid tepid relationships, where people ask for what they think they want, maybe, but are also just uninspired by their own imaginations. Scenes slip by throwing barely obscured metaphors willy-nilly.  

Reading the play leaves me with a feeling of wistful melancholy. The performance amplified this feeling, but also brought a warmth and connection to the characters that deepened it, gave it subtlety. The unconsummated relationship between Debra and Diana was given wings by the performances of Meg Bowden and Brie Jurss. Complemented by their third performer, George Harris, we see a strong partnership of young actors sinking their teeth deeply into an startling original script. A powerful and intriguing play and one well worth another visit.