At the Sans Hotel: Don’t Go Without!

In the study of literature we sometimes have to contend with the convention of an ‘unreliable narrator,’ who, as his or her unreliability is revealed to us, forces us to reconsider our point of view concerning the tale that he or she has been imparting to us. In the theatre unreliable narrators are rarer, mostly because plays are not typically narrated in the same way as novels, but with one woman shows, such as At the Sans Hotel, created and performed by Australian theatre artist Nicola Gunn and playing now at the Next Stage Festival, the audience often does find itself more reliant on just one person’s perceptive of the story that she has chosen to tell. The result in this play is a disjointed, sometimes dark, sometimes tender, often captivating, at times confusing, but always fascinating and unpredictable submersion into the unstable mind of a mentally ill woman, based in part on Cornelia Rau a “sometimes German woman who was wrongly incarcerated as an illegal immigrant for 28 months in an Australian Detention Centre”, whose sense of her own identity and reality is in constant and dramatic flux.

We are immediately introduced to Sophie, an endearing French girl with a nervous intensity and a penchant for rambling and hopping between topics that don’t seem to be immediately connected. Her acute self-awareness roots her firmly in the audience’s heart, however, she is sheepish and one gets the impression from the moments that Gunn allows Sophie’s capable facade a fleeting escape, that this young woman is facing deep turmoil inside. As a performer the way that Gunn accomplishes this is masterful; her emotions are so raw and the feelings welling up beneath her performance mask are subtle, but powerfully moving. She interacts immediately with her audience, although it is interesting that she begins expressing her desire for a “conversation,” but then quickly retreats into the safety of her own monologue. This, I think, is indicative of Sophie’s desire to interact, but perhaps her inability to put such desire into successful practice. She is obviously wanting to revel in being onstage, wanting to be liked and accepted by her audience, at one point she even passes around alcoholic beverages telling us, “I think we should all get drunk,” but then immediately she berates herself for hosting a lame party. Sophie’s distrust for the audience, stemming from her own insecurity, is apparent as she casts fiery looks at individuals when she thinks they are laughing at her, or being ironic, and finally culminates in her scolding an audience member, quite viciously in fact, for his inability to succeed in a botched game of musical chairs. What makes this sequence work onstage, of course, is the irony that in order for Sophie to be so self conscious and suspicious of her audience, Nicola Gunn is giving an entirely brave and confident performance from within her and thrusting huge amounts of faith and responsibility on the individuals in the audience, trusting them to deal with Sophie in a kind, sympathetic and positive way.

Sophie then melts away, inside of herself, and another personality emerges, a German woman named Anna Schmidt, who spends a large portion of the show communicating in German with a voice, akin to a self help tape made by someone channelling Julie Andrews, which is later revealed to be yet another personality vying for supremacy inside this woman’s mind. This portion of the play is visually stunning (with the help of Gwen Holmberg-Gilchrist’s vivid lighting design), and deeply intense and because it is not at all linear in structure, it is left largely up to the audience to interpret the “meaning” (or does there NEED to be meaning?) of the sequence for themselves. For me, I felt that this part of the play was one that I did not see, hear or understand so much as felt, and felt on a quite primal level. Gunn, for me, was able to go beyond explaining, intellectualizing or representing mental illness here and actually created an insightful environment where I felt that I was experiencing a deeper level of understanding of it than I had been aware of before. This is quite a feat for 75 minutes in the theatre!

The theatre is really an ideal avenue for this sort of exploration because it provides an immediately ironic, but also, I think, sympathetic framework, in that actors are people who spend their lives pretending to be someone that they are not. We go to the theatre largely to escape into another world, an imaginary one, which we have interactions with. What would happen if we lost ourselves in that world? At the Sans Hotel does not make an attempt at answers, but instead seeks out empathy and honesty, even amid fallacy, fantasy and performance, truths, certainly not definitive or singular ones but truths nontheless, still glimmer there, if only slightly beyond our perfect grasp.

Apparently a theatre critic at The Age said of this performance, “I would watch Nicola Gunn shell peas,” I would too.

Also, click here to read a beautifully insightful and articulate review of this play from Australian Stage.