La Spagnola

Lola's (Lola Marceli) heart is ablaze. Gutted that her long suffering husband Ricardo (Simon Palomares) has done a runner with the house savings and another woman, she is left hungry, pregnant and destitute with her teenage daughter in a tin can of a home in an outback Aussie town. By the way, this is intended as a comedy.

Thrashing around the house with vitriolic anger, her teenage daughter Lucia (Alice Ansara) bears the brunt of her acerbic tone, absorbing it quietly like a sponge. When Lola realises her husband has bought a flash car with their savings, all hell breaks loose and her Machiavellian plot for revenge kicks in.

Meanwhile the husband, sick of his new mistress, Wendy, and her cholesterol living, makes plans to leave, but is again seduced by her nymho tendencies, this time with fatal consequences. In a sordid scene of the blackest possible humour, the action flashes between Ricardo being literally shagged to death by Wendy and Lola's self-induced abortion, needles and all.

Apparently unphased by all this, Lola moves the family and in-laws in with her to cook and soon has the dead husband's brother deviously wrapped around her thighs in lieu of rent money. Besides this, she cajoles another sidepiece (Alex Dimitriades) to spy on Wendy, in exchange for sexual favours.

The only humanely redeeming character is Lucia. As an English translator to the local doctor, she makes light of the immigrant community's problems and invents comical translations for her own amusement as well as our's.

Ansara's performance is appropriately understated, providing a much-needed counter-balance to Lola's impetuous scorn. Marceli appears slightly overwrought, but then that is the fault of the script more than anything. She provides some hilarious moments, particularly constipation in the au plein air dunny, shrieking for revenge on her husband with unabated chutzpah, as Lucia sheepishly walks by, while the most horrendous flatulence accompanies her prophetic words. Lourdes Bartolome, as Aunty Manola, also provides a laugh or two. In the tritest of manners, she finds a lascivious use for zucchinis to satisfy her extra curricular desires, while stuck in the kitchen, preparing Elvis the goat for an evening meal, much to the disgust of Lucia.

The comedy aspects are on a par with The Black Death and would work a treat if the characters had been developed with some genuine human qualities. Instead, we're left indifferent to all but Lucia. The humorous input is eclipsed by Lola's overly pugnacious nature. She may live in the rough-and-tumble world of immigrant survival, but the lack of tangible motives for her pernicious antics towards everyone and everything, not to mention her unfeasibly contrived U-turn in sentiment at the end, leaves what is supposed to be a bitter sweet comedy, bitter sour and mean spirited.