YOU should neither hope nor fear for a Ridley Scott experience of ‘How to Keep an Alien’. This comedy solo and autobiographical show tours to Lime Tree Theatre this Friday October 23 at 8pm for one night only. Essentially it is actor/ writer Sonya Kelly’s story of trying to keep her Australian stage manager girlfriend Kate here in Ireland.
“The bureaucratisation of love”, is Sonya’s premise for ‘How to Keep an Alien’ which glowed to reviews during its month-long run at Edinburgh Fringe this year. Trust her to be fun as her ‘A Wheelchair on My Face’ solo, which looked back on her childhood wearing formidable glasses, brought the house down at The Savoy two years ago.
Nudged as to how you get a comedy-drama out of the tedium of paperwork and exile, her practical yet cerebral self comes to the fore. Sonya Kelly’s is a presence well able to cover the stage that she shares in this instance with stage manager Justin Murphy on sound and lighting.
“What’s that they say in the music industry, ‘go big or go home?’ I think if you are there, it is not the time to phone it in”.
Empathy is key and she recalls that something she learnt in writing memoir “is to remind people of their own feelings as much as your own”. She speaks of arousing them in the audience, “feelings of commonality with them, that oscillating back of forth between you”.
Thus while the set is largely in our minds, through recordings and visuals the story takes us places, to the bar in Scotland where partner Kate worked for a while, or to camping in a forest in Australia.
“We recorded talking with her family, her mother and her father and these sounds are played”. The playwright [with Gina Moxley directing for Rough Magic] documented time spent in the visa office, recording real people having visa issues and “we spent a lot of time pulling in the realia of the show. It’s not just another vehicle motoring at you”.
Sound and visuals are evocative: “There’s Aboriginal music and the way a pop song reminds you of a time and place”.
Let there be no oversight of tenderness. Sonya acknowledges upping her game, in working with Moxley “who sets the bar high” and especially, in writing revealingly about this journey with her love partner.
There is the external monologue of talking to strangers through a glass wall; the internal one of yearning – and reward. One thing is sure: her take of ‘love across the miles’ will be worth it.
