Backwards in High Heels explores the difficult manoeuvres of a couple facing the mid-life crisis of their marriage. The title references the way women are expected to move in Argentine tango, but it’s also a clever play (pun intended) on how the two female characters navigate their roles in life through the metaphor of tango: Holly (Narelle Ahrens) who is trying not to face the truth about her marriage, and Marta (Amie Tilton), whose tragic past affects her ability to understand human relationships.

This is a welcome revival of Stuart Hoar’s 2006 work which initially premiered at the Court Theatre.  The cast of three – actors with little dance experience – are ably supported by four tango dancers, two from the local Auckland tango community (Megumi Kawata and Sergio Corvalán Trejo) and two leading dancers from Argentina (Leonardo Pankow and Valentina Massari, currently ranked 6th in the world). The opening scenes are interspersed with brief displays of dancing – we are only treated to a full song right at the beginning. For a lapsed tango dancer like myself and the audience which included many from the tango community, this was a highlight. I would have loved to have seen the dancers used more. The actors sometimes move onto stage during the dancing segments, but they don’t interact; the dancers are a manifestation of what’s going on under the surface.

The set design (Sherlly Duan and Boshi Wang are credited as creatives) is minimalistic: the Basement’s black walls, a pair of chairs facing each other on either side of the stage where the dancers sit when they’re not dancing. Through the actors’ scenes they watch, silent witnesses to the conflict. Jazmin Whittall’s lighting design subtly reflects characters’ internal states. At times, changes in location (from Jonathon and Holly’s home to the tango studio) were hard to pick up, due to the minimal cues.

Rupert Green does a convincing job as a wannabe alpha male, toxic masculinity defined, ‘media conceptualist’ Jonathan.  From the beginning, we hate his sneer, the way he takes work phone calls in the middle of emotionally vulnerable attempts at conversation by Holly, and most of all for me, the way he dismisses tango as “a pop culture signifier of middle-class, middle-aged romance. A tiny fragment of turd floating in the great liquid manure ocean …” Yeah sorry dude, no wonder she’s happy to spend her evenings in the arms of strangers.

Holly is initially captured by the grace of tango dancers she sees during a public performance.  But when she meets the mysterious Marta, she is intrigued by the challenge of mastering the steps, but also Marta’s elusive personality. Tilton imbues Marta with a feline grace; intense, but emotionally just out of reach. When dancing with Holly, Marta takes the male role of ‘leading’ – controlling all aspects of the dance, though, as she later explains to Jonathan, this also requires the consent and collaboration of the female partner. Ahrens as Holly is warm, initially naive, moving with endearing beginner clumsiness (I can relate).

Hoar’s complex script moves from explaining the basics of tango movement to the science of attraction and bonding. The cold description of the chemical reactions that control mating and reproduction is contrasted to the fluidity and raw emotion of the dancers and music. But despite the humanity of tango, Marta reminds us that it still reflects the male dominance of both the art form – the words are 97% written by men, and overwhelmingly about betrayal and loss.

A friend and local tanguera pointed out that the tension of the dancing couples – the professional couple set against the local social dancers – parallels the tension of the three characters as they manoeuvre emotionally around each other. Jonathan, while delegitimising Holly’s growing interest in tango, secretly engages Marta to teach him how to dance, too. He changes the subject when Marta asks if he’s doing it for Holly – and it turns out, he really isn’t. But neither tango nor his clumsy attempt at sexual betrayal can fill Jonathan’s emptiness, just as Holly can’t convince him to walk away from a job that even he admits consists of persuading people to buy things they don’t need.

Backwards in High Heels suggests uncomfortable truths about the human race. Marta is a sociobiologist in her day job; she views humans as no more than baboons, compelled to acts of betrayal and dominance in order to assert dominance and for their genes to survive. But it gets even more uncomfortable when Marta starts dropping confessions about her past – her family destroyed during Argentina’s Dirty War, when military dictators kidnapped ordinary people and killed them publicly while citizens pretended not to notice. The parallel with present day military disappearings and de facto dictators is impossible not to think about – though the current situation would not have been imaginable when the play was first written.

I was left musing on the nature of human connection at the play’s bittersweet denouement. Maybe Marta is right and love is just a convenient cocktail of chemicals, relationships simply a biologically motivated survival strategy. If so, then why shouldn’t tango, with its every touch, gesture and movement codified in convention and occurring in a space where consent is public – also be a believable way to express affection? Tango is famously described as a ‘three-minute love affair’. The joy and intimacy of connecting with a stranger is, for me, the most compelling part of social dancing. Life is fleeting – why shouldn’t we enjoy the beginning, middle and end of a relationship, wrapped in the space of one song?

Backwards in High Heels, like tango itself, casts light on the darkness and complexity of human connection. Go for the dramatic concept, stay for the dancing.

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