A review, and links to other information about and reviews of The Aunt's Story by Patrick White.
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His own sea of memories, creative struggle and quest offer insights to Theodora's odyssey, particularly in the surreal middle section called Jardin Exotique, in which a muddle of figures, moods and experiences suggest the lone traveller has split into bits.
In a swirl of images, past and present fuse and Cook's staging shifts gear to become more expressionistic to boldly orchestrate White's poetic and symbolic vision of a world marching into madness. The black rose in Theodora's hat represents fragility and unusualness, the transition from life to decay.
Cook taps into some of the novel's colour symbolism and uses amplified sound to give the production's voices a ghostly feel or to accentuate hallucinations in the cycle of three distinct yet progressive stages. In the final part, called Holstius, Theodora is returning to Australia when she pulls the cord to her own free-fall escape and brings the train to a grinding halt.
The pace and rhythm slows and Cook gives the dissolve into derangement the breathing space it is due, resisting the urge to satisfy the impatient with quick turns of the theatrical "page". Morse is quite remarkable at this point, seeming to have diminished in size until we are reminded of her tall shadow again. Sculpthorpe's music is fittingly evocative, the mood and atmosphere of her retreat in America and its bridge to Meroe and her father, languid and restful.
Revisiting Patrick White: The Aunt’s Story | Reid on Writing
The production features an excellent cast who summon up the personalities and spirits of a range of folk, at turns grandly eccentric, insufferably large or investing heart and earthiness in the unhappy tale. And they'll break you. But perhaps you'll survive. Theodora could marry -- she fascinates Huntly Clarkson, and they become close friends -- but she does not. It is not in her. Fanny, once she has fulfilled her ambition, is easily dismissed: Fanny was safe now, she had children and possessions, she could dispense with love.
For Theodora safety is never that easy to find. Her role as aunt -- even as "the Respected Aunt" --, does not suffice.
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And so she sets out for Europe. To find a world. The second part is Jardin Exotique , after the odd refuge, the exotic garden, she is drawn to in a French hotel. She spends considerable time there, and White ignores most of the rest of her travels, focussing on her experiences there, and the characters she encounters. Among the guests at the hotel there is Katina Pavlou, a teenage girl looking for love, to whom she can also be an aunt. There is also General Alyosha Sergei Sokolnikov, who winds up seeing in her his sister, Ludmilla a role she willingly submits to.
The exotic garden is "completely static, rigid, the equation of a garden. Disaster ultimately, inevitably comes.
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The brief final section, Holstius , finds Theodora in the middle of the United States. She has almost completely lost touch with reality, and in the final scenes she gets off a train in the middle of nowhere and wanders aimlessly. She is taken in by a family -- briefly allowing her to reprise her role as aunt -- but she wanders off again. Lou touched the sundial, on which the time had remained frozen.
She was afraid, and sad, because there was some great intolerable pressure from which it is not possible to escape.
The Aunt's Story
Lou looked back over her shoulder, and ran. Although the novel was shunned by critics and the reading public upon its initial publication in , White himself expressed a personal fondness for it: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Letter to Geoffrey Dutton, 13 December Works by Patrick White.