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Barbara Loots
Sophie Joans’ latest play, DOG ROSE, directed by Jemma Kahn, starring Anthea Thompson alongside Joans, is onstage at the Baxter Theatre until 1 June 2024. It promises laughter with a tear or two, and has the potential to grab an audience by the heart with its thorny story.
DOG ROSE was originally developed in the Artscape’s New Voices Programme 2022 and debuted on the National Arts Festival’s 2023 Arena Programme, where it proved very popular amongst festival goers.
It’s the story about a dysfunctional mother-daughter connection, which follows mother Rose (Anthea Thompson) and daughter Nina (Sophie Joans) as they try to make sense of their lives, the world, and their relationship. Rose has always struggled to find her place in the world. As she says, she’s always “tried her best” at everything she does, but sometimes loud crowds, itchy dresses, or just life in general overwhelms her and she retreats to the sense of control she finds in her garden amongst her dog roses. When her daughter, Nina (named after the Dog Rose, rosa caNINA), was born, she hoped to find calm in a relationship where she could be herself at her own pace. Yet, motherhood requires Rose to run at the pace of the world, leaving her feeling as if she’s always playing catch-up.
The audience gets a glimpse of Rose at various stages of Nina’s life: birth, toddler, hormonal teenager, young adult. Nina’s relationship with her mother has always been complicated, as she’ll very happily tell you, but she finds that she understands Rose more after she realises that her mom could be a high functioning person with autism. However, teenagers being teenagers, not even this realisation can keep the occasional tantrum at bay. Within this context, the play raises awareness about autism, which has historically been mis-diagnosed in women and girls.
Anthea Thompson is a theatre legend, and rightfully so. When she steps onto a stage, every line is well considered and delivered with clear intent; no unnecessary thrills or fuss. I’ve always liked the fact that she has a natural presence in her performance style and doesn’t overact or unnecessarily force a moment. She gives that same considered performance again here in DOG ROSE. The only issue being that on opening night, especially in her initial monologue, I really had to strain to hear her. Perhaps opening nerves played a role or maybe it’s a sign of vocal fatigue in this instance (which could happen to the best), but there seemed to be an issue with her ability to project her voice at times. Apart from that, Thompson managed to capture my attention through the humanity she layers into her character. She triggers understanding for Rose, which immediately puts you in her corner.
Joans steps onto the stage and into her character like the firecracker comedian she is. As a young performer she must still master the art of gaging where the line between laughs for the sake of laughs and laughs for dramatic storytelling lies. Every time I see her onstage, she seems a bit more comfortable in that explorative journey. She just needs to realise that one can find comfort in letting the quiet moments cloak you, as her one heart-breaking monologue in the play reveals: there is power in being still and allowing an audience to experience a moment with you. Just let the story breathe.
I do wish there was a bit more chemistry or ease in the onstage interaction between Thompson and Joans. They do the right dance and hit all the cues, but I’m not sure I completely bought into their mother-daughter dynamic that’s the golden thread throughout DOG ROSE. Joans and Thompson share the stage, each playing personalities with conviction, but it doesn’t feel as if they truly share in the moments that should form the heart of the play.
The script has all the right emotional triggers built into it. It tugs at the heart strings with a balance between comedy and sentimentality, especially at the start when you meet toddler Nina with rollerblades on the roof threatening suicide (with no such intent), or later when Rose opens up about her engagement and marriage to Nina’s father, which makes you believe that the dream of “the one” still exists in a cynical world.
DOG ROSE does a good job of tapping into broader relatability, while dealing with a very specific issue. The content of the script is cleverly packaged to make it significant to a wider audience, even when focussing on the normalisation of conversations about autism and how it stands to impact family dynamics. Within the specificity of that theme, the play allows for a generally relatable family theme too: Chances are most people will have a parental figure in their life with whom they have a close but difficult relationship at some point or other (usually when one party is in their very angsty teenage years).
The script could be a bit tighter at times with the cutting or reshaping of some repetitive moments and words. The comedy in the text is at the forefront, while the dramatic counterparts could be more nuanced still. I’m perhaps showing my age here too, but deleting one or two “like” sentence fillers could also allow for easier flow of the text.
The show in its current form exists in that space where two one-person plays meet, the key issue being that instead of one making space for the other, they are simply trying to hold space despite one another.
As a whole, DOG ROSE does give laughter and tears at certain intervals, with the tears mainly triggered by moments found in individual monologues. Especially the monologue where Joans’ character contemplates what life would be like without a “difficult” mom (which at times Nina wishes for) had me wiping away a tear or two.
The set design, though practical and designed as a quick strike-and-travel festival product, gives the actors a bit too much to trip over, metaphorically speaking. It’s unnecessarily cluttered and competes with the actors at crucial moments as your eye occasionally wonders off to little bits and bobs of scenery. This especially happened for me towards the final climatic moments in the play, which I completely missed as I was too occupied wondering why an invisible hand was struggling upstage to get the dog roses to bloom by pushing buds through a trellis.
Also, and this is a personal bug bear, but theatre makers should take more pride in the actual stage upon which they tread when a show is in an established theatre and not in a quick turn-over festival venue: Removing the markers on the floor and slapping a bit of black paint on it with an occasional wipe down adds to the feeling of a professional production. DOG ROSE is by no means the only show guilty of this, it’s perhaps just unfortunate that I can no longer bite my tongue about it. Respect the hallowed space within which you perform.
DOG ROSE, currently onstage at the Baxter Theatre’s Studio until 1 June 2024, has real potential to settle into something quite sweet. But there’s some blooming yet to be done to turn it from festival packaged favourite to full grown theatrical production. It’s always worthwhile seeing a show at different stages of its development trajectory. I look forward to seeing how this one settles outside the rush of a festival circuit, if given the opportunity to do so. Tickets for its limited season Baxter run can be booked online through Webtickets.