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The Lady In The Water, 1947. Courtesy of The Juniper Gallery. Photo - Toni Frissell

Jenny Kemp’s Kitten delineates the tumultuous journey of a woman pushed past the brink of despair following the traumatic loss of her lover Jonah, who is missing at sea.

The play begins in the maelstrom of Kitten’s trauma. An ominous sound reverberates in the background as four actors stand motionless on a blue-lit stage. Just like that, the audience is plunged under the sea, swept along with Kitten, into the depths of despair. In her quest to find Jonah, Kitten resorts to buying scuba gear and jet skis so she can scan the ocean and researches hyper-intelligent dolphins to delve beneath it before she realises that in her sadness and anguish she has lost more than Jonah: She has also lost her own voice.

Kitten is a sophisticated and comprehensive theatrical production. It employs many story-telling techniques which compel and compound. Jenny Kemp’s writing oscillates between eloquence and coarseness as the audience becomes privy to Kitten’s stream of consciousness, her dialogues with Manfred, played by Christopher Connelly, Jonah and herself. The character of Kitten is embodied by three actors; Natasha Herbert, Kate Kendall and Margaret Mills. As the play unfolds, Herbert, Kendall and Mills remain onstage simultaneously, embellishing various facets of Kitten’s psyche with synchronicity and detail.

The actors evoke the vehicle of voice to delineate both discordance and revelation. The subtleties of inflection and intonation which they use throughout Kitten - at times menacing, exasperated and helpless - manifests for the audience the disruption and fracturing of Kitten’s journey. This is compounded by the use of various sounds such as markers scraped on whiteboards and birds reeling through headphones, which envelope the stage, wrapping around Kemp’s characters and their dialogue.

The story of Kitten as she begins a “rollercoaster journey from the depths of despair to soaring hope” is bolstered by Kemp’s meticulous direction which succeeds in agitating the distortion in Kitten’s mind. The narrative turbulence of Kitten is galvanised by Anna Tregloan’s innovative set. At times toying with the spatial perceptions of the audience, and at others mirroring the emotional landscape of Kitten’s mind, Tregloan’s set design is fused with the narrative vivacity of Kitten’s journey, bringing to stark life her search for Jonah, her own voice and for hope. Helen Herbertson’s choreography and attention to “movement language” embolden Kitten’s story, enabling Herbert, Kendall and Mills to physically manifest the hidden thoughts, emotions and fears which are locked up within the recesses of the body.

Jenny Kemp’s Kitten is a unique piece of theatre. As Kitten’s journey evolves and her “reality reasserts itself”, music becomes the channel for communicating her transformation. Kendall provides a distinguished performance singing a variety of songs with depth and expertise. Kitten is a production which benefits greatly from the quality of its actors and the intricacies of Kemp’s writing, which realistically creates a subterranean world of despair, but challenges its characters to chart a course out of it as well. 


Melbourne International Arts Festival and Malthouse Theatre present
Kitten
Jenny Kemp

Venue: The CUB Malthouse, Beckett Theatre
Dates: Wed 8 – Sat 11 Oct 7.30pm / Tue 14 Oct at 6.30pm / Wed 15 – Sat 18 Oct at 7.30pm / Sat 18 Oct at 2pm / Tue 21 Oct at 6.30pm / Thu 23 Oct at 1pm / Wed 22 – Sat 25 Oct at 7.30pm / Sat 25 Oct at 2pm (Performance on Tue 14 Oct followed by post show Q&A)
Audio Description: Wed 15 Oct at 7.30pm
Duration: 1hr 30min no interval
Prices: Season: Full $49 / Groups (10+) / Seniors $42 / Conc $37
Bookings: Ticketmaster 1300 136 166 / www.melbournefestival.com.au
The CUB Malthouse (03) 9685 5111 / www.malthouse.com.au