Shadows in Bloom: outstanding acting overcomes cartoon, genuine divide

Leaving the Waterfront Theatre after Gemma Wilcox’s one-woman show, Shadows in Bloom, leaves you with the distinct feeling that good theatre does exist and can be a glory and a privilege to behold- that and the words, “Daaaamn gurl!” on your lips. Wilcox gives this show her all as performer, writer and co-director along with Shana Cordon. There is something close to 20 different characters and Wilcox convincingly plays every single one helped only by lighting cues, a few tracks of music and a piano bench, and may I mention miniscule sweat stains. It’s almost inhuman what she does.

Portraying both human and inanimate characters, Wilcox tells the story of turning-30 Sandra who just moved to London to be closer to her saxophone playing boyfriend Pete and his daughter Lou, excuse me, Louise, despite the eight year old’s obvious dislike for our protagonist. Wilcox’s performance is so nuanced and natural in each character that only when she switches rolls do you notice that there is one person on stage. And Wilcox is phenomenally careful with it. She’s doesn’t waste the energy speeding from one character to the next. Instead she lets her remarkable voice or the widening of a leg change the audience’s entire angle to make the scene feel full. There is one moment when Sandra stands in an elderly neighbor’s garden and Wilcox, though soon to portray the elderly woman and half a dozen plants, is able to stop and take the moment to breath in the garden. As Wilcox waters the first row of the audience, giving balding members a little top off for a few new sprouts or plucks seeds from a dead sunflower and drops them into the sink (a sink that isn’t even there) you trust you are in skillful hands, which is always a pleasing feeling when watching a one-woman show.

Though the acting is of the highest quality and on its own makes the play a worthwhile experience there does seem to be a tonal flaw with the script itself. Caricatures like the French Sunflower Pierre and Kevin the Calla lily, who delightfully channels the British sit-com Absolutely Fabulous, seem at odds with Sandra’s more serious failure to have a family of her own. As an audience member I couldn’t always rectify the cartoony with the painful genuine, even though I enjoyed them both

Perhaps it speaks to the central character of Sandra herself. By the time we see her trod on by her boyfriend and mother only to plants do we get a sense of how much she wanted to be a mother in the first place and how darkly she senses this pain. It’s in a beautiful Frida Kahlo type tableau of decapitating her boyfriend, lobsters boiling and giving birth that we become privy to Sandra’s deeper internal struggle. We are given clues prior, of course, the elderly neighbor asking about Sandra’s “biological clock”, a rival woman telling her she better get started, but these are superficial and we are never given the angle into deeper Sandra until the end, when it’s too late. Perhaps such an angle is there from the beginning but the cartoony portrayals obscure it and dropping lines about biological clocks and turning the big 3-0 (really 30 is not that old) lack the sophistication that the play and Wilcox demand. Not to say that caricature and sophistication can’t cohabit in a play, but here, they aren’t matching up convincingly, not as convincingly as Wilcox’s acting.

Wilcox performs in another Fringe show 52 Pick Up at Waterfront Theatre and if her co-star does as good a rendition of her boyfriend as she does, then it should be a good show.

Shadows in Bloom is on as part of this year's Vancouver Fringe. For more information go here.