Ilona Hanne reviews The Revlon Girl at Inglewood’s TET Cue Theatre, running from now to March 23.
I will admit to not wanting to go to this show. Based on a true event - the Aberfan Disaster of 1966 (in which 144 people were killed; 116 of them children) - I knew it was going to make me cry. What I didn’t expect, however, was how much I would also laugh, nor did I expect to leave the theatre feeling as uplifted as I did.
The play opens with a large projector screen on stage. As the audience lights go down, a short film plays, with the sounds of children’s laughter and a school bell helping build the picture we see on screen. Happy children settling in for a day of learning. Then we hear the rumble, and see the landslide of coal waste rushing towards the school. It was always going to be a haunting scene, and with the recent footage we have seen here in Aotearoa New Zealand of all the silt and mudslides caused by Cyclone Gabrielle, it was perhaps even more haunting than directors Michelle Chainey and Sharren Read had planned.
As the horror of the incident sinks in, the action begins on stage, with Maddy Klever’s nervous but well-meaning and kind-hearted Sian setting up space in a room above the local pub, ready for the arrival of the Revlon Girl. Maddy has excellent comic timing, with her facial expressions and answers to the offstage Jackie (Nicola Knight) as she deals with a leaking skylight a great way to relax the audience into laughing after such an emotional start.
Sian has arranged for herself and some of the other grieving mothers from Aberfan to have a makeup demonstration, but is worried others will judge them for doing something so vain after losing their children. So worried, in fact, she plans to tell anyone who asks that the Revlon Girl is actually a visitor from the Red Cross of the Women’s Institute.