Catherine Downes' finely crafted as-semblage of Mansfield writing creates a picture as radiant and mysterious as her subject.
Rather than attempting to produce a definitive portrait, the play adopts an impressionistic approach, with luminous details emerging from a swirl of words and images that have been drawn directly from Mansfield's
journals, letters and stories.
Little attempt is made to establish the historical context and key identities are often designated by their nicknames or initials. Being unfamiliar with Mansfield's world, I found this frustrating, but the overall effect seems well suited to her elusive personality.
In one journal excerpt she speaks of the futility of trying to find a permanent, essential self and describes herself as possessing hundreds of selves. This protean quality is brilliantly captured by Danielle Cormack, with wonderfully spontaneous shifts in voice and tone. Her delivery makes the journals sound like journals - a free-flowing jumble of thoughts, impressions and half-formed ideas. Cormack also brings a down-to-earth quality to her performance - sentiments that might seem ponderous in print are tossed off with an easy, self-deprecating charm. She teases D. H. Lawrence for his obsession with phallic symbols and loses herself in a hilarious riff on the eating habits of companion Ida Baker.
These moments provide a welcome counterpoint to the darker episodes in which Mansfield wrestles with depression and is haunted by the fear of tuberculosis.
Katie Wolfe's sensitive direction gives free rein to Cormack's idiosyncratic talent. When reading excerpts from Prelude and The Doll's House she slips into a curious infantile voice that convincingly establishes the child-centred perspective of the stories. By contrast, when discussing literary theory, she engages the audience with a quizzical stare that invites conversation.
The play's fragmentary nature is nicely echoed by a set design that chops up photographic images of Mansfield and by Jane Hakaraia's lighting, which allows Cormack to drift in and out of brilliant illumination.
By acknowledging the fundamental enigma of its subject, the play is deeply revealing. The woman behind the writing appears most clearly in her writing and the play succeeds in the ambition of all literary biography, which is to send us back to the work of the author.
* The Case of Katherine Mansfield is at the Herald Theatre, to Sept. 16
