Cristina in the Cupboard – subtlenuance

Overview

We’ve all had moments when we feel like fashioning a bed under the desk at work a la George Costanza or locking ourselves in a cupboard to get away from it all, but few of us have the chutzpah to actually do it. Paul Gilchrist's Cristina in the Cupboard follows the trajectory of someone who does.

Cristina (Sylvia Keays) comes from a middle class family and has had a pretty normal life so far, until she decides to withdraw from the world to contemplate life. There’s some confusion about why she's doing this — she uses Jesus and Buddha as the precedents to defend herself to her family and then talks of searching for Leviathan.

She’s certainly no Ahab, driven to distraction in search of the white whale; in fact she doesn’t seem to have a driving force to speak of. Her rejection of the world is quiet rather than adventurous and Keays portrays an alarmingly self-contained unit.

Gilchrist has no qualms presenting the themes in his plays in binary simplicity; Rocket Man played out the opposition between artistic fulfilment and usefulness, in Lucy Black we saw an argument between reason and intuition and in Cristina in the Cupboard the debate is between isolation and engagement.

This straightforward rhetorical structure is a charming trademark of subtlenuance’s work, but the arguments in Cristina in the Cupboard do tend towards repetition and there’s only so much philosophising we can digest before something dramatic needs to happen. Gilchrist reveals his writing process with lines like, "you’re mixing metaphors" and "why would the leviathan have claws?". These notes in the margin don’t have much of a place in the final script.

While the script may amble somewhat, Gilchrist's direction of the cast is tight and the actors all seem to be having a ball. Helen Tonkin playing Cristina’s pragmatic mother is a standout, making light work of a number of dense monologues. Her wry humour and direct delivery will snap you out of any ascetic compulsions you might be harbouring.