The Performance
‘I can't recommend this too highly' Patrick Gale
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4,0 • 1 Bewertung
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- 3,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
'Quietly transformational'
The Times
'A tour de force... I can't recommend this too highly'
Patrick Gale
'Innovative... an original, at-a-sitting read'
Daily Mail
'A potent meditation on the intensity of women's lives'
Charlotte Wood, author of The Weekend
'A miracle... Engaging and evocative'
Washington Post
'I loved and admired The Performance... Unmissable'
Emma Stonex, author of The Lamplighters
'Lively and intimate... The way Thomas plays with the reader is a sort of genius'
Guardian
'Thomas writes these women with such wisdom and compassion, that by the end we are all transformed'
Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground
The false cold of the theatre makes it hard to imagine the heavy wind outside in the real world, the ash air pressing onto the city from the nearby hills where bushfires are taking hold.
The house lights lower.
The auditorium feels hopeful in the darkness.
As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play.
Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone.
As the performance unfolds, so does each woman's story. By the time the curtain falls, they will all have a new understanding of the world beyond the stage.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thomas's incisive sophomore effort (after Fugitive Blue) follows three women of different generations and backgrounds as they separately attend a performance of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days in Melbourne. While bushfires rage across Victoria, the women sit in a dark, air-conditioned theater, watching the play unfold as they consider their own existential fears and desires. Margot Pierce, a literature professor in her 70s, grapples with the prospect of retirement and her husband's illness; Ivy Parker, a middle-aged philanthropist, contemplates the still-excruciating loss of her first child; and 22-year-old Summer, a drama student and usher at the theater, worries about her girlfriend, April, who must travel into the fire zone to help her parents. Though the women only cross paths briefly, during a witty section of the novel that unfolds at intermission, their respective anxieties about climate change, the confines of womanhood, and love and loss intersect magnificently throughout. Meanwhile, as the onstage drama progresses, the play's protagonist becomes increasingly trapped by the desiccated earth, thus serving as a performative embodiment of the women's own inexorable journeys through time. This richly rendered and perceptive meditation on motherhood, memory, and the challenges of living through frightful times will hold readers spellbound.
