Streaming as part of this year’s NZ Fringe in New Zealand, Doing Time With Lavinia is a brassy, bruised musical portrait of Lavinia Draper: a woman of ‘a certain age’, marinated in booze and regret, pacing the confines of a jail cell that feels less like punishment than destiny.
Once a performer who tasted the footlights, Lavinia now circles the wreckage of a career that never quite aligned with the promise she once trumpeted to anyone who would listen.
Performer-director Susan Campanaro attacks the role with feral commitment: wild hair, mascara smeared like battle paint, and a voice that splinters and scrapes as though forced through broken glass.
Through songs composed by Lynn Portas (one is an anthem thanking Betty Ford for being a public alcoholic, another begging Betty Buckley for a chance to play the lead), she charts Lavinia’s ascent and undoing.
Lavinia’s story takes predictable turns – the bright-eyed girl thrust toward the spotlight, the hunger mistaken for love, the industry’s velvet-gloved exploitation.
Doing Time With Lavinia leans hard into comic excess, mining big laughs from bigger delusions or ‘Baby Jane’ typecasting, yet never lets us forget the quiet theft at its core of youth, of agency, and of a future perpetually deferred.
Filmed before an appreciative audience, the production is crisply captured, allowing every slurred aside and defiant high note to land. Lavinia is gloriously large, loud, and verbose, but her unshakeable faith in a talent the world has long since dismissed proves devastating.
Forever the chorus girl tapping for relevance, clutching at passing men and reading destiny in the dregs of a bottle, she is exhausting company.
Watching her feels like witnessing a train accelerate toward the buffers – brakes gone, eyes blazing – determined to mistake impact for applause.
The recording of Doing Time With Lavinia can be rented here: https://tickets.fringe.co.nz/event/446:8406/446:31934/ as part of the NZ Fringe, or on demand through C Arts here: https://res.cthearts.com/event/34:5054/34:82151/.
It is also going to Edinburgh Fringe this summer: https://sites.google.com/view/doingtimewithlavinia/home
Previously reviewed C Arts shows Fires On The Plain and Hiding Behind The Mask: Jesters, Jokers, and Clowns are also replaying as part of NZ Fringe.