THE FAIRY GARDEN
Talisman Theatre
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The Fairy Garden starts out as conventional drama. Roman and Mimi, two men who are longtime lovers, are drinking cassis and seltzer in the lush garden behind the luxurious home of their friend Dagny. At first they all seem relaxed and contented, but soon we learn that Dagny is distressed. She can’t decide if she should stay with her wealthy husband Boris or move in with her lover, an auto mechanic. Then when Dagny goes into the house to get more ice, Roman starts to accuse Mimi of neglecting him. “You just love yourself, yourself and no one else,” he sneers. Mimi, fed up with Roman’s paranoid accusations, breaks up with him with theatrical flourish. “Call your therapist, Roman,” Mimi concludes. “He gets paid to listen to your prattle. I only get fatigued.”
From this point on Kondoleon turns into a class clown, trying anything and everything to get a laugh. Dagny’s husband is murdered, then gets miraculously unmurdered by a bitchy fairy. Mimi declares his love for Dagny. A male stripper, sent by the fairy, arrives to entertain Roman.
Stolen Moments, produced by the Talisman Theatre, is performed in the same room of Sheffield’s as The Fairy Garden, and it also deals with some of the idiosyncrasies of erotic love. But instead of staging a play, director John Norris has adapted snippets from a variety of sources, ranging from the poetry of Walt Whitman to the romance novels of Barbara Cartland, to show some of the strange behavior brought on by carnal desire. The idea behind the show, which is part of the Talisman Theatre’s “Club Lingerie” series, is intriguing, and some of the scenes work quite well. In Surrender the Pink, for example, adapted from a novel by Carrie Fisher, a young woman named Dinah (Stephanie Heller) tells about “the first time I lost my virginity.” Her story is sad but never maudlin, steeped in that particular ambivalence toward sex that plagues adolescents. “The sex, come from nowhere, goes back to the same place,” Dinah says with a sigh after her unforeseen encounter with a male friend.
