Beware, however, of Greeks bearing gifts. It is a rare thing indeed for a play to centre the experiences of older woman, to consider female senescence as its own subject. While we may have Lady Bracknell or Ranevskaya as formidable elder women in the theatre, they exist as part of generational and gendered constellations. In The Weekend, our women are the world of the play, they make its rules, are agents in its disruptions. For the most part, except for comic relief, men are not seen or heard. The vernacularity of the setting and the broadness of the gags initially occludes the play’s radicalism, but as the subjectivity of these women becomes apparent so too does the realisation of how rarely we see women’s experience of old age depicted as the fundamental stuff of the dramatic.

(L-R) Belinda Giblin as Adele, Melita Jurisic as Wendy, and Toni Scanlan as Jude (photograph by Brett Boardman).

The Weekend slowly reveals the many forms of precarity suffered by these women. For Adele, an actress, that precarity is financial as the work dries up due to the perceived dwindling of her sexual and social capital as a woman of a certain age. Belinda Giblin’s Adele clings to girlishness on the surface, but it becomes apparent that she has sustained her acting career with steely stoicism as well as sex appeal. Giblin gives us both registers, often at once, and in so doing astutely mitigates the risk of rendering Adele an object of pity. Melita Jurisic is Wendy, a once rabble-rousing feminist historian who continues to mourn her husband, in a holding pattern of emotional precarity. Jurisic’s Wendy is somewhat fey, but also arch and clear-sighted. Her companion is her beloved dog, thoroughly and elastically alive to us in the extraordinary puppetry of Keila Terencio.

Jude makes up the third member of the triumvirate. She is a retired restaurateur with a silvery bob and linen clothing that would not be out of place in Mosman or Malvern – or in an average theatre audience in Australia. Jude, as played by Toni Scanlan, is controlling and highly controlled. Her precarity, however, is that of the mistress. Toni has maintained a relationship with a married man for thirty years, existing on highly rationed crumbs of affection, deprived of the social and financial legitimacy afforded by marriage.

In The Weekend, in the strange space of the festive season, our three women confront the problem of how to grow old in a world that fails to recognise their vitality and their venerability. Their project, although never articulated as such, is to make meaning on their own terms, in spite of their sense of increasingly straitened possibilities. Based on Charlotte Wood’s 2020 novel of the same name, The Weekend offers a feminist meditation on ageing, albeit one contained in the lolly-wrapper of a beach house setting and initially broad characterisation.

The novel has been expertly adapted for the stage by Sue Smith. Smith’s script is economical and precise in the move from page to stage. The stage design is extremely simple, supplemented by light and sound that generate a vivid sense of the hot December weather, as well as the cooling possibilities of the ocean. Sarah Goodes, fresh from her successful direction of Julia, has mastered something very tricky here: given us an ostensibly modest production that might seem to tick all the boxes for the subscriber crowd. There are knowing gags, characters that look like recognisable types, and a local monied setting. But in her capable hands, the play moves from the generic to the insightful in the very act of placing Adele, Wendy, and Jude centre-stage as the makers and modulators of their own reality.

The Weekend continues at the Belvoir Street Theatre until 10 September 2023. Performance attended: 9 August.