RaveThe Conversation... echoes Beckett’s musicality. Thomas tends to the base, cloying, funny, fragile disturbances that make theatre an imperative act. She gives breadth to her characters’ thoughts in tension to the daily performances they play in the role of mother, grandmother, friend, wife, lover, daughter ... She opens up the care it takes for these characters to not leap into easy connection, to allow space for their own and a stranger’s difference. She teases out how ideals and identities fall short of life’s ambiguity. She gently holds the inescapable paradoxes of wanting, needing and enduring in these strange-becoming-stranger times ... a poetics of the political, without preaching or judgement: it triggers burning questions. This is achieved through the novel’s clever structure ... Written with passion, The Performance is a brave book: unafraid of confronting the dissonances of living in a modern Australia.
