Review: Smells Like You at The Blue Room Theatre
Smells Like You at The Blue Room Theatre
Thursday, July 18, 2024
An elderly woman took a walk down her street and returned home. Her memories sparked with each sight and smell she encountered and lingered lovingly across various family members—her grandmother, her husband, and her child.
This was the through line of Smells Like You, a multi-sensory, multimedia presentation by Perth troupe Lady Great Theatre Company. A delicate, thoughtful, heartfelt piece of art much more interested in evoking a feeling of time, space, and memory than dictating a precise three-act plot, the performance allowed a high degree of interpretation as to what the core meaning could be.
There was a blurring of memory and what was in the present. Was Macy’s husband still with her, waving from the hallway, or was he a flicker of the past? Was she afflicted with dementia, or was she a widow? Whatever interpretation was arrived at, there was a distinct, though underlying, feeling of confusion and loss throughout.
The performance itself was an intriguing combination of puppetry on stage indicating the present and a backlit screen showing the past, inhabited primarily by shadow puppetry. Visual and colour cues began subtly and then reinforced strongly over the run-time, as the character was taken back to the three or four primary memories, scents, and family members.
A low-key yet distinctive soundtrack of jazz classics delineated the world outside from what was within. The timing and integration of these multiple sources of input—four out of the five senses involved—were conducted impeccably by the performers.
Apart from the song lyrics of Etta James, Nina Simone, and Louis Armstrong, there were perhaps ten words of dialogue across the entire performance, each word carefully selected to elicit deep reactions within the hippocampus lizard brains of each of those watching.
A piece of theatre made with a great degree of care, effort, and respect, Smells Like You eschewed the need for almost all modern stories to save the world and brought the audience back to the importance of small-scale intimacies.
A courtship evolved. A tree grew. A family aged.
Akin to a hug among friends who haven’t seen each other for a while, shared cups of tea and biscuits, a relaxed, unhurried conversation, or a toasty hot heater in the depths of winter, Smells Like You was both deeply comfortable yet affecting, a heady mix of hazy nostalgia and connection to loved ones. A delightful, delicate slice of life.
PAUL MEEK