The connection to the myth, however, while planted well, does not bear the fruit that theatre company Collide have set out to grow, here.
The Woman Who Turned Into a Tree at Omnibus Theatre is an intriguing blend of sound, movement and text. Written by Swedish play- and screenwriter Lita Langseth and translated by Rochelle Wright, it is a heady exploration of a woman’s attempt to reinvent her identity into the “perfect version” of herself.
The play itself is an homage to the Greek myth of the nymph Daphne who begs her father to transform her into a tree in order to escape the unwelcome and manic advances of the god Apollo. In Langseth’s story, Daphne (Bathsheba Piepe) is the obsessed one, overwhelmingly stuck on the idea of being “the girl with class” and the concept of who she is in other people’s eyes. Her father, rather than a river god, is a working class man in a psych ward, and, instead of turning her into a tree, implores her to remember her wild spirit (embodied in the play by Ioli Filippakopoulou as a similarly dressed and be-wigged woman who crawls out of a wardrobe wearing a blazer backwards).
The basic plot line is that Daphne lives in a rubbish flat that only has one window which is blocked by a tree outside that may or may not be moving closer to her (but is the only flat she can afford). She has a classy job at a nightclub (the wage from which allows her to buy and wear designer outfits regularly, if not a nicer flat), and is unfulfilled and wholly unsatisfied with life as she has not yet reached the pinnacle of her perfect self. The derogatory words and phrases that are scrawled in chalk and cover the floor and furniture of Ioano Curelea’s set, and the fabric that looks eerily similar to a very large bin bag draped around the space is a good representation of this inner turmoil we’re told Daphne has. The space and the movement, designed by Filippakopoulou, which is staticky and fragmented reflecting Daphne’s difficulty in embracing her full self as she is, is at odds with the swankiness of the nightclub setting and this dissonance does well to further Daphne’s distress.
Bathsheba Piepe and Ioli Filippakopoulou embrace the weird of Daphne’s psyche, often mimicking the other, or posing in the elegant ways Daphne’s witnessed classy women do on social media; her main source of existential panic. The moments of quiet by both actors following revelations from Daphne’s boss and a phone call with her dad were particularly poignant.
The connection to the myth, however, while planted well, does not bear the fruit that theatre company Collide have set out to grow, here. The men are not as emphatic in either their pursuit or dismissal of her, more apathetic than Apollo ever was, and her desire to become the tree and/or forest that her mentally unwell father adamantly requests is acted upon only within the last few minutes and even that deep change is made by her unnamed counterpart with a jug of water while she claims it as her own. It all feels superficial and entirely unearned and when the lights go out, and the audience applauds, I’m not sure what growth and learning we’re praising.