If you like your coffee black, your femmes fatales ice-cold and your unreliable narrators on the seedy side, then The Tangled Skirt, running in Thomastown Community Hall on Thursday and Friday, April 16th and 17th, might just be the play for you.
Playwright Steve Braunstein, a self-professed aficionado of the classic age of Hollywood film noir of the 1940’s and 50’s, fashions a modern take on those twisty tales of deceit, corruption, seduction and violence, wallowing in the tropes of the time and enjoying himself mightily in the process. The play is in many ways a celebration of what those movies had to offer and an affectionate homage to the artistic achievements of a bygone era.
Shadowy images
The first nod to those shadowy images flickering on the silver screen is in the setting, a grubby bus station in a ‘barely noticeable place’ a few miles south of the Canadian border. It’s after midnight, an hour when everybody in this sleepy ‘zone of nothingness’ should be sleeping.
But, of course, they’re not…
Enter Bailey Bryce, clutching a duffel bag, breathless, furtive and obviously spooked by something. It is not giving too much of the plot away to describe him as a small-town dreamer, a self-styled ‘weaver of tales’ who has ‘never been anywhere’. He deals with the harsh realities of life through a combination of illusion and delusion. So far, so noir.
Inevitably, as in all good film noir, a femme fatale arrives. Bailey describes Rhonda Claire as ‘the kind of woman you’d thank for tearing your heart out just because she took the trouble to look at you.’ Though obviously disconcerted by her grimy surroundings and rattled by the unexpected stranger in her midst, Rhonda has little option but to make small-talk with the garrulous Bailey.
So begins a game of cat and mouse. Neither character is quite what they seem, so where does the truth lie? How much is bluff and artifice? Why are two strangers sitting in this dingy locale at this ungodly hour waiting impatiently for the last bus out of town?
It soon emerges that there’s been a murder in town earlier that night. A rich man has been ‘gunned down, robbed blind’. As Bailey observes, ‘somebody’s on the run, with a whole bunch of money’. Could Bailey be the killer, or is it enigmatic Rhonda Claire?
Eamonn O’Connor plays the scheming and shifty Bailey Bryce while Clodagh Kenny smoulders as the seductive Rhonda Claire in this St. Michael’s Theatre Drama Group production. To add to the tension, Bailey finally admits to having ‘a thing’ for the icy-veined Rhonda as the finale approaches.
Who will eventually board the 2a.m. bus to Thunder Bay or will there, as Bailey ruefully muses “be anyone left standing when it gets here?”
