Daze of Our Lives

Watching Handspan make theatre, their creative process, their own interpretations of my work ... by taking liberties and not confining themselves to what I may have 'meant' by a single drawing, the artists of the company have taken the work to a new level which is innovative and inspiring.

Each one of Mary Leunig's drawings is bubbling with comment, narrative and action, all of which is a godsend to a company like Handspan, whose work it is to let the universal language of images speak to the hearts and minds of audiences.

Working this way is really arse-about for us because it's taking images and then working back. Normally what we take is a notion or a story and then pull images out of that. Staging the drawings was actually quite easy - creating some sort of drama out of that was the really difficult part. There were so many drawings to choose from, great pictures creating miniature stories, but finding a way to link all that and have a character develop was the tricky part ... There was no way for the audience to access any of the humanity of the piece unless we did have a central character''

It's everyone's black world and everyone's fantasy world and my function in the piece is to be that human element that can filter, can comment and have a sense of irony about the piece, of being in an environment that seems to be closing in. How this person is able to detach herself and make a comment on what is happening will in many ways undercut what can seemingly be a black moment.

Performer Julie Forsyth as She builds a determination and self-reliance while negotiating her way through both puppetry and props, and and does so with a vulnerability earmarked by both confusion and resolution. She is a full, honest character, neither saint or martyr, and as such holds the audience interest while negotiating life in the suburban '90s.

In the standard Leunig living room the harried 'she' figure attempts to cope with rubbish that accumulates as fast as it can be disposed of, windows that become barred prison walls, a headless husband whose newspaper suddenly grows arms and legs and rears up metres high, and a couple of hessian figures to perform a weird mummer dance of copulation and mutual mutilation.

Designer Laurel Frank and the company's puppetry magic have produced a strong, faithful piece of theatre that strikes a good balance between narrative momentum and moody, surreal detour.

I aimed to focus the design on what the play was trying to say about the internal world, extending on the feelings that are found in Mary's drawings and bringing them into the broader environment.

One of the most evocative Leunig images recreated during the performance is that of a woman with a beautiful pair of wings who is obviously meant to fly in the sky. Instead she is held back by the clay on her feet, which she tries in vain to chip off. In the production it speaks reams about a woman's unfulfilled potential, and the memory of it is still haunting.

Powerful images using puppet techniques bring the anguish of a woman all too close to the bone. Images of child abuse with the use of dolls, domestic violence and cameos of the Gestapo leave no part of the smutty, boring, psychotic side of housewifery unexplored. The show was impeccable but the material seemed dated. The image of male as perpetrator of all womens' woes was unrelenting

Mary Leunig's world as interpreted by Handspan is feral domestica - a breathtaking work of visual theatre - with objects materialising and vanishing miraculously from the darkness. Furniture can suck a woman out of existence, the television set spits out dross, the lamp dances with the broom and the cat - well, it copes quite well with the existential mayhem. She, however, does not. She is being held siege by her own domestic life.

Handspan have risen to the challenge of Leunig's work magnificently. If the show is not a complete success it is perhaps because its very project is incompletable: the translation of static drawing to a dynamic show, in which narrative cannot help but intrude, tends to dilute the fantasised, primordial nature of the drawings. It's an entrancing work that benefits from being watched with a more shifting, relaxed consciousness, more a drifting in and out, than is usual in a theatre piece.

This is theatre that doesn't tell the kind of story that has a beginning, middle and end. But it does tell a story of a housewife enmeshed, of her extravagant fantasies and desperate fears. Daze of Our Lives is grand visual theatre.

The production goes for a full 70 minutes without an interval and every moment is a joy to see. Not to be missed by anyone who enjoys good drama which lies outside the confines of much of our theatre today.

In this delightfully imagined production, Mary Leunig's celebrated images of domestic angst and fantasy are taken from the page and transformed quite beautifully by Handspan Theatre into a vivid and seamless stage dream.

Performance and puppetry have not coalesced into a gripping, exciting and dramatically cohesive entity.

In its swirl of images there is much that is clever, but without a clearly thought out and developed narrative, Daze of Our Lives is little more than a series of disjointed episodes.