First-Rate Second-Hand Rose - Fringe Snips
⊆ July 23rd, 2006 by courtney | ˜In Pursuit of the English Rose, performed and adapted by Hilary Kacser from the memoir, In Pursuit of the English, by Doris Lessing
Reviewed by Tim Treanor
It may only be coincidence that this one-woman show, performed in the closeness of the Warehouse Screening Room, perfectly replicates the conditions of a London coldwater flat on a sweltering summer evening. Cars buzz and hum in the hazy background and the heat wafts through the walls like a mugger on a mission. Only mad dogs and Englishmen present themselves in weather like this, and Kacser, as Rose Jennings, is a little bit of both.
The single defining virtue of the English is denial – a unique ability to impose their own worldview over obvious reality. Rose Jennings, swaddled in woolen clothes and nylons, is as oblivious to the heat as the citizens of London were oblivious to the terror bombing, and the nation as a whole steadfastly ignored the obvious military superiority of the Nazis with the same pigheaded resoluteness.
Rose Jennings was a clerk in a jewelry shop who briefly shared a rooming house with the novelist Doris Lessing. Lessing imbued Rose with real and sympathetic characteristics, and Kacser captures every one of them.
Rose is no hero. She is sweet, but not very bright. Rose loves Dickie, a counterman for a local tobacconist, and as she rapturously describes the stratagems she is employing to win him we know instantly that the relationship is doomed and that Rose will never know true love. This is due to Kacser’s extraordinarily detailed characterization. Her Rose is minutely observed and displayed to us with exquisite specificity. Indeed, Kacser achieves the apex of the actor’s art: she disappears into her character.
Although on opening night Kacser struggled with some of her lines, there is no minimizing her accomplishment. For sixty minutes a moment in an ordinary life sixty years ago is made as clear to us as the outline of our own hands.
The Pursuit of the English Rose runs on Sunday, July 23, at 4 p.m.; Thursday, July 27 at 6.15 p.m., and Friday, July 28 at 8.30 p.m., all at the Warehouse Theater Screening Room, 1017 7th Street NW. Tickets are $15 and may be obtained at www.capfringe.org.
