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Still Angela

Playwright: Kemp, Jenny
Year: 2002
Type: Play
Edition:
Playbox Theatre Company, April 2002

Currency Press, 2002

Synopsis

Still Angela is an unpredictable portrait of a contemporary Australian woman at three ages. On the cusp of her birthday, Angela goes on a real and imagined journey through time: up the garden path of her childhood; into the kitchen with her lover; and into a train that travels in to the Simpson Desert. It is here that deep change can occur and she relocates herself within the wider landscape. The possibility and inevitability of change is recognised, and Angela realises and celebrates her life. This evocative and innovative play may be read as a modern fairytale, exploring the linear and cyclical nature of a woman's life. — publisher's blurb

Narrative Locations

Angela's home, Adelaide, South Australia  

Temporal setting: Circa 1980-2000

Location notes:

Angela's home/s, which form the kitchen and garden path scenes, are located in Adelaide. Though the "kitchen home" is identified as being in the Adelaide suburbs, it is only implied that the "garden path home" is also in Adelaide (possibly the same home). Coordinates have been given for the inner-Eastern suburbs of Adelaide and are approximate.


Lake Eyre, Flinders and Outback, South Australia  

Temporal setting: Circa 2000

Location notes:

Angela travels past Lake Eyre on her desert train journey.

Quotes

“Angela 1's voice: [voice over] Lake Eyre and the Simpson Desert is the driest part of the Australian continent. Lake Eyre for the most part if a large salt pan at 9,300 square kilometres. The lowest part of Lake Eyre is eleven metres below sea level. Lake Eyre fills a few times each century when the rivers of Queensland receive enough water to push through the dry maze of channels and billabongs on the edge of the Simpson Desert.'

Angela 3: That's a long wait.”

(p. 15)



The Dead Heart, Lasseter, Northern Territory  

Temporal setting: Circa 2000

Location notes:

The play describes the desert landscape of the Simpson Desert outskirts as the 'Dead Heart'. The train steward tells Angela they are near Finke River at this point. Coordinates given are for the Northern Territory and are approximate.

Quotes

“Angela 1's voice: [voice over] The Outback. The Dead Heart. The desert. These names make you think of images of heat, vast tracts of sand, a featureless wasteland where little grows and nothing lives. Many people think a desert is a desolate and lonely place. But in the desert, by moonlight, animals that are nowhere to be seen during the say are everywhere.”

(p. 15)


“Angela 1's voice: [voice over] The areas of Australia were once covered by sheets of polar ice and, well before that, by great areas of shallow seas. As our continent edges slowly northwards, its desert regions will have time to reach the equator and once again become tropical regions.

Angela 3: Inside the sand is a forest. Waiting for water.”

(p. 16)


“Angela 1's voice: [voice over] In the Simpson Desert the rainfall is low, but it is not a virtually rainless desert like the Atacama or Sahara. Even here annual rainfall is hardly below 130 millimetres anywhere. In autumn when monsoonal troughs have penetrated this far south, often if also means floods when three to four years worth of rain come in one fall.

Angela 3: Nothing, nothing, nothing, then a downpour, like three deaths in a row.

Slight pause.

When it comes it comes. . .

An announcement of the loud speaker:

Voice-over: Attention please, ladies and gentlemen. There will be a stop shortly, at Finke River. We will stop for approximately 45 minutes. You can leave the train if you wish. But you must be back on board in plenty of time for departure. Thank you for your attention.

Angela 3: [calculating] If I walk for a quarter of an hour to the east then quarter of an hour to the west, I'll make it back in plenty of time.

(p. 17)


“Angela 3: I can hear it breathing, I can hear it, it's moving inside it's moving everywhere, the wind the birds, the air the sky the moon, the stars, the clouds, the grass, the earth, the ants the worms, the spiders, the leaves the trunks, the apples and oranges, the rain the hurricanes the sausages we eat, the potatoes down in the earth, the insects, the darkness, the tree shadows the roots under the ground, the caves, my lunch box my walking, the stillness the winter the hail the snow, little bushes in the desert, the heat rising off the desert the rivers the ponds the puddles, the sea and the ocean the moon the stars outer space. The wind, the wind in the sea, the sun in the sand, the rain in the clouds, me in the storm, my body held in the gale rigid forced backwards, the worms down there inside the dry sand, the stars in the sky the hot air in my lungs, the drops of rain down my neck, my back, inside my nose, my mouth, my red blood pumping next to the river, the current, the tide, the rapids, the twig on the water shooting past, the cold night, the dark air, the age of the sand, my feet on the ground, the light all over, the day light making day bright, falling on my skins, warming me, heating me, sand stuck to my face, but under the shade of the tree, the shadow.

Pause

I'm inside it.”

(p. 18-9)





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