George and Honor have been married for thirty-two years. He’s a well-regarded, award-winning writer, who is having a profile written about his life and career. Honor was also once a writer, but she let that slide when she gave birth to their daughter, Sophie. She says she has no regrets, that marriage comes with sacrifice and she wouldn’t trade her child for anything. But when George leaves Honor for Claudia, the woman writing about his life, the foursome have to deal with where they’ve come from and where they’re going.
Joanna
Murray-Smith’s play, Honour, is the work that made her career. While studying
at Columbia University, the first reading of the play saw Meryl Streep, Sam
Waterston and Kyra Sedgwick in the cast. The first production was at Playbox in
Melbourne in 1995, but was soon seen on Broadway and the West End.
For its
thirtieth anniversary, Red Stitch has programmed Honour as its first
play of 2025, under the direction of Sam Strong – who is returning to the
theatre for the first time in over a decade.
The play contains
a lot of Murray-Smith’s career-spanning concerns, about the visibility of
women, the passion/delusion of writers, and the middle-class being unable to
get out of the way of themselves. Her characters love to talk and over-analyse
their lives and the back-and-forth sparring is where the action lives. Honour
doesn’t have a plot so much as a situation for the characters to stew over for
100 minutes.
I prefer Murray-Smith’s
work when she shakes herself out of the well-to-do suburban milieu that she has
mined for so long. Rockabye was stacked with issues, but the rockstar
central character is one to relish. Switzerland’s imagined version of
Patricia Highsmith meeting a Ripley-esque character is layered and complicated.
American Song is a devastating monologue about gun violence; the production
at Red Stitch still lives close to my heart.
The
characters in Honour are dissecting their lives to such a degree, it’s hard
to really care about them. The dialogue is snappy, but everyone is so in their
heads, intellectualising their existence to such a degree, it’s exhausting. It
doesn’t help that the play is a series of two-hander scenes, swapping out the
characters over and over, to find new combinations of conflict.
Strong’s
production puts all four actors in the space for the entire run time, with the active
characters ascending to a stark white platform that looks like a photographer’s
light box or a square on a chess board. The two other actors look on or are
observed by those on stage. It sparks some resonances; Gus stares at his wife,
as he talks to his new lover. Honor deliberately avoids Claudia as she tries to
understand George’s reasons for upending their life together.
Caroline Lee is impressive as Honor, slowly letting down her guard and finding the right tone to eviscerate her husband over his late-midlife crisis. Peter Haughton has fun with the silver-tongued silver fox who is difficult to sympathise with. Lucinda Smith’s Sophie is the only one who feels like she’s feeling her feelings. But Ella Ferris struggles to get a grip on Claudia, save for her late turn away from George.
There are
moments where there is a frisson of tension and passion, mostly in the unscripted
transitions – as characters pass each other, leaving and entering the stark
white playing space. Murray-Smith’s writing speaks to a truth about women
sublimating their desires to support the men in their lives, but it’s so
concerned with the characters articulating their feelings, I found it hard to
feel anything much at all.
Yes, there are passages where the characters speak in short staccato sentences, unable to find the exact right words, but we spend so much time in their heads, we rarely get a sense of their hearts.
- Keith Gow, Theatre First
Honour is playing at Red Stitch - in an almost sold-out season - until March 23
Photography: James Reiser
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