Review of Floral Notes at Circa

Floral Notes at Circa is true to its title. It is everything the expression “floral notes” conjures up. Thank you cards, fancy stationery, perfume, and gardening advice. Geraldine Brophy wrote the piece and it is unsurprisingly, whimsical, quaint, poetic, hopeful, gentle, and just the slightest bit silly.

The two characters who make it to the stage were pen friends as school girls and are slowly making contact again after years of disappointing silence. The path to being friends again is littered with mistakes, there was no reply to a letter, a no show after a long journey, they misunderstand and offend each other, but inevitably the play slowly brings them together for a satisfying curtain-call hug.

Rosemary and Iris are at opposite ends of a continuum of the places women of a certain age find themselves. Most of us would probably be pleased to be at either of the ends they have reached. There is Rosemary is who loves her flower garden and grows nuts and veg. Her husband died but she still talks to him and asks his advice and what’s more seems to take it. She is a back to the land gentle hippy but it is a pity that Brophy played her as rather sad and washed out in a raggy faded outfit and poor-old-thing makeup. The part would have suited the vivid Brophy we all know and love.

Jane Keller plays Iris who lives in New York. She is an art dealer and lives with a reconstructed family of gay ex-husbands and bossy daughter. She sits elegantly on the roof-top above her apartment and Rosemary coaches her by email to make a garden there.

There are songs to reinforce the messages of the relationship and the life and times of the two middleaged women, These Are The Good Times, Missing You, We Remember Love and other songs set the theme. Michael Nicholas Williams does his customary excellent job on the piano and Jane Keller belts out her stuff in her powerful wobbly cabaret style and does some sweet harmonies with Geraldine Brophy.

The stage is clearly and cleverly divided into New York and New Zealand. Rosemary sits in a cream wicker chair, Iris on black leather and chrome. Rosemary’s garden is characterised by generous swathes of glorious flowery fabric and when the garden is established on the New York rooftop the geometric shapes are replaced by large flowery canvases.

Floral Notes is warm, sentimental and tender, what’s not to like about that?

ENDS

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