“Maureen – Harbinger of Death is something so much more than an elegant elegy to a woman who refused to be invisible after forty. Johnnie Hawkins script and graceful performance is a celebration of the wisdom, worldliness, experience and expression that older women would bring to our understanding of life, if only we would let them.” – Kate Stratford
4.5 Champagne Binges
A question. Why is the life experience of men, their words and advice so eagerly sought whilst that of women so roundly ignored? Ask any woman, and she will wryly tell you what it is like to be over forty; a persona non grata.
Maureen – Harbinger of Death is something so much more than an elegant elegy to a woman who refused to be invisible after forty. Johnnie Hawkins script and graceful performance is a celebration of the wisdom, worldliness, experience and expression that older women would bring to our understanding of life, if only we would let them.
From the beginning Hawkins makes it clear that whilst Maureen may be the focal character, the philosophy is a culmination of that of many older women he has known. He then steps into her, becoming with finesse the eighty-year-old who holds us in thrall as she wanders through her memories. His voice lifts in pitch, acquiring that faint, breathy quavering quality that comes with age. His hands shake ever so slightly with active tremor. His face assumes the wry mask that comes with age. And so we are drawn into her memories. They may slip and slide a little but Maureen always manages to find her way back to her central point. Like many older women, her personal exploits are hinted at, more than explicitly drawn. For that is the way of this largely forgotten group of people.
Maureen is just a little bit fabulous. Okay, more than a little. Her setting (conceived by Isabel Hudson) is flamboyant, sensual but sophisticated. Just as she is. Beside her is a small table holding her weapons: cigarettes, a lighter, an ashtray, jewellery and the most powerful weapon of all – her lipstick. It is battle paint. (As any woman knows, in her heart.) You will look at our lips, and listen.
This tour de force pulls apart what is means for older women to be “alive awake, dreaming and dead” and it is only in this last area – the experience of death – which seems to present the most challenges for Hawkins and Nell Banney (co-creator and director). In these small passages the empathy for Maureen, the engagement with audience, becomes more tenuous. In terms of the overall writing, this seemed the least certain. More powerful is the use of the Persephone myth, threading the storyline and bringing a deeper understanding to women’s unspoken lives.
If Hawkins mission is to celebrate older women, to show they are something more than witches or crones to be ignored or talked over, he has succeeded with a vengeance and if you can leave without a tear in your eye, you are a better woman than I.
Kate Stratford, Theatre Now
