View from the Green Room: A vixen with issues
Rose Henderson in Vixen at the Theatre Royal.
The single piano notes that sound on the bass keys and Angie’s funeral weeds are ominous.
It’s been a year since her lover was killed in a rock-climbing adventure on a local mountain.
Significant really. A married man carrying on a clandestine love affair is always destined to fall and the repercussions frame the narrative of playwright Helen Casey’s “Vixen”.
It’s Day 365. An anniversary. And Angie wants closure. Or so she says. Because Angie says a lot over the course of the next hour and it’s not always on the same wavelength.
She’s reliving every cherished memory of the times they spent together and measures out his comings and goings to her small apartment. And like all artists, she’s got a graphic if sometimes colourful memory.
The theme of memory is always before us. Its elusive nature and the difference between what we wanted it to be and what actually occurred.
Loving someone else’s husband isn’t easy. There’s no wink-and-elbow language of delight here. She’s listed in his phone as “Boiler Repairs” and she still treasures the coded texts as tiny as tic bites. “O” for Dublin Airport… "Red Eye” for London… "12 S” was noon at the Shelbourne”.
Angie is the vixen that steals another woman’s husband. She’s a predator and no inflated storyline around her love affair disguises it. She spits out her description. “Mistress… duplicitous bitch… wench, harlot, cheat… bit of fluff."
All attempts to convince herself that she doesn’t care come to naught as she imagines fantasised meetings with his wife at the graveyard, the church, her flat where reconciliation with the wife of the man who loved two women occurs. A Hollywood finale to a romance of the ages.
Angie is conflicted. Torn between the sometime-love she shared with Martin and the bitterness of being the bit on the side. The outsider at the funeral unable to express her grief for fear of discovery and struggling to find some information about the rock-climbing accident when Martin descended into a blanket of air and rock and earth.
“Wives get lives” but mistresses are reduced to events and wait for hearsay and gossip about the expert rock-climber with no harness. The wife gets it all… details… circumstances… family that comfort… friends to bear her coffin of grief.
Helen Casey’s script is a tough watch. We’re asked to feel the grief of a woman who constantly self-deprecates, reminds us that she is a “low grade liar” and who sometimes smirks at the plight of a woman who is probably oblivious to her husband’s affair.
She’s in a never-never land created by social taboo and shared by society. Destined never to feel sympathy, while struggling to feel sympathy for herself.
Rose Henderson is superb as Angie. Note-perfect from start to finish, Rose is a whirlpool of conflicted emotions and she tells her story well. Rose’s triumph is her ability to hold some sympathy for a woman who struggles to feel sympathy for herself.
This particular vixen comes with issues.
