'The false cold of the theatre makes it hard to imagine the heavy wind outside in the real world, the ash air pressing onto the city from the nearby hills where bushfires are taking hold.
'The house lights lower.
'The auditorium feels hopeful in the darkness. '
'As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play.
'Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone.
'As the performance unfolds, so does each woman's story. By the time the curtain falls, they will all have a new understanding of the world beyond the stage.' (Publication summary)
'A multi-dimensional treat, Claire Thomas writes with graceful precision in her newest fiction work The Performance.'
'Set during a bushfire, Claire Thomas’s second novel juxtaposes the performance of a play with the inner lives of its audience.'
'There is a celebrated moment in Jonathan Glazer’s 2004 film Birth when Nicole Kidman enters a theatre late and sits down to watch a performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre. The camera remains on her perturbed features for two whole minutes. This image kept recurring as I read Claire Thomas’s new novel, The Performance. In it, three women sit and watch a production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1961), alone in their thoughts, their whirring minds only occasionally distracted by the actions on stage. If for nothing else, Thomas must be congratulated on the boldness of her conceit, on her ability to make dynamic a situation of complete stasis.' (Introduction)
'Set during a bushfire, Claire Thomas’s second novel juxtaposes the performance of a play with the inner lives of its audience.'
