Gertrude Stein, often proclaimed the mother of modernism, is resurrected on stage in a play that celebrates her life, her love and her revolutionary forays into the dynamics of language.
This stylish, intricately intimate work transforms Stein's frequently impenetrable verbal experiments into highly accessible monologues. Her lesbian love affair with Alice B Toklas is central to the evening and through this affair the audience sees how Stein played with language to make it yield the truth of her feelings.
The tone throughout oscillates between the playful and the cerebral. The play opens to the minimal-ist accompaniment of strings, as a square spotlight highlights first one piece of wallpaper, then another, then a hat with a tassel, then a mounted handbag, so that there is a sense of a collage being built up - an obvious tribute to the Cubist art that so influenced Stein's idiosyncratic and influential writing style.
Lola Pashalinski plays the statuesque Stein so that sometimes she evokes the gravitas of a Roman emperor, and sometimes - with her burnt orange shirt and embroidered black waistcoat - she looks more like an escapee from a Beryl Cook painting.
As Alice B Toklas, Linda Chapman first appears sitting in a white chair with a white handkerchief draped over her head, but her facelessness speedily gives way, once the handkerchief is whipped off, to a series of sharp, bird-like challenges to her lover.
"She is an aid, to all that she aids, she aids me . . ." boasts Stein of Toklas, as she details the trials and triumphs of struggling to become an influential writer. The question of whether Toklas was any more liberated than a devoted little heterosexual wife grows as Stein reveals that her lover even makes her phone calls for her. Even so, this play is a warm tribute to the pair's love. It is an ornament of wit and stimulating linguistic experiment.
Gertrude And Alice: A Likeness To Loving
