“This is a theatre of empathy, compassion and courage. It affirms life and living through performance…”
Kenton Stevens
4 (Four kilometres…to Heptonstall)
Venue: ETU Ballroom, Victorian Trades Hall, Carlton
Melbourne
Dates: to 18 Oct 2026 (as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival)
“He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains…”
(from Lovesong by Ted Hughes)
The beauty of great theatre? It leaves you changed. Or, you feel changed. Not just emotionally, but certainly that; no, changed in perspective too. And maybe, on some cellular level. You are not the same afterward as you were before.
Speaking of change.
Why is it that over the course of our lives some relationships, some people in our story, stay with us like a kind of persistent echo over time? Like a familiar refrain from a Beethoven violin concerto, perhaps. For some people, it’s a main character in their story. For others, a player with but a few lines, yet one who still leaves a deep and lasting resonance. Maybe it’s because our time with those people changes us. After them, or through them, we see the world differently. Experience it differently. Live in it differently. Maybe it unlocks something in us, and thereafter we might meet the world in a new way.
At 95, writer, comedian and performer Liz Hicklin acknowledges she has the privilege to look back over the course of a long and rich life. She can see its arc. And as the body slows and weakens, there is time, all too much time, all too much sitting, to take stock. To revisit parts of her life story.
So it is that together with ABC broadcaster and writer (and performer) Jacinta Parsons, Hicklin has crafted her story into a wonderful piece of theatre. Yet, this is not simply a retelling of timelines and events from an extraordinary life, which would be engaging and moving in itself. This is a theatre of empathy, compassion and courage. It affirms life and living through performance, at an age most career actors would think twice about, let alone someone who only took to the stage (for stand-up comedy, no less!) at 93. The work feels like a reclamation of a life story. A determined choice to recast ageing by actively examining and embodying story as a gift to others.
A brief word on this evening’s performance; or rather, the circumstances surrounding it. In a deeply unfortunate turn of events, Liz Hicklin became unwell before opening night. She was unable to perform in the first two shows. A message recorded from her hospital bed, and played at the top of the show, gave the audience a window onto the woman they were going to meet through character. It was a precious moment. Hicklin’s role in the work is being filled superbly by the inimitable Debra Lawrance. To add a further twist (you really couldn’t script it), the other actor in the show (Sarah Sutherland, playing Sylvia Plath) was unwell too. Enter Parsons (Co-writer and Director) to convey Plath, and admirably so.
For theatre is a living, breathing beast, which can change course very swiftly. It was alive and well tonight.
Hicklin (Lawrence) sits, recounting and reflecting on key events. She talks to us about ageing. About the span of her life that lies behind, and what lies ahead. And about what it means to make a huge impulse furniture purchase at Freedom when you’re 90; a rash decision, an act of defiance, or an unexpected meeting with one’s mortality?
However, before we can settle into Hicklin’s intended one-woman show, her intimate monologue, she is interrupted by none other than the iconic ‘Sale of the Century’ voice of veteran broadcaster Pete Smith. Suddenly, Hicklin’s story is recast. She is unwittingly part of an unwanted, but somehow inevitable, game show. Will she choose the right partner? Will she win at the game of life? And, who should play ‘the Gift Shop Girl’ responsible for showing off this game show’s gaudy prizes, but Sylvia Plath!
A central part of Hicklin’s story, as she shares it, is her relationship—whilst a young woman fresh out of Manchester and training to be a nurse in Cambridge—with English poet Ted Hughes. It is the launching point for a deeply Romantic (almost Hardy-esque) and affecting exploration of life up on the Yorkshire Moors. Life with a mysterious and charismatic literary figure who would go on to become Poet Laureate, and one of the English language’s greatest exponents of the form. And, inevitably, a brush with Sylvia Plath, whom Hughes married after Hicklin had travelled (initially only temporarily, for a working holiday) to Australia.
Hicklin is reluctant to engage with Plath (Parsons), who’s not meant to be a part of this story, having stolen in from the wings yet again. However, as events unfold, they find a bond, maybe even a resolution. A shared appreciation as women who were determined and driven, who strove, and struggled, and suffered. In a meta-theatrical scene of great poignance and pain, Plath warns Hicklin about an upcoming moment in the script. She asks how they will handle it. Together, they sit, as Hicklin recalls her two daughters, her babies who became the most interesting of women. Daughters she lost to suicide—but 7 years apart—when they were adults. The lasting, reverberating pain is palpable, inevitable.
That this is a moment in the play shared with Plath holds deep resonance. Underscored, in turn, by Hicklin talking about her visit to Plath’s grave in Heptonstall, and her profound emotional reaction while there.
Lawrance is terrific as Hicklin. She connects with the text and her story beautifully, especially after what sounded like comparatively little time to prepare. She captures Hicklin’s spirit, grit, and her wry and dry northern humour. For we find Hicklin ‘in fine fettle’, as they say up North. Lawrance guides us along this remarkable journey, and creates spaces and moments to allow Hicklin’s insights and reflections to take flight.
Hicklin doesn’t seek praise or admiration for her boldness, her courage and choices, the telling of her stories. Her living. Rather, she is celebrating all that she is. Her very being.
She simply wants us to see that she is here. She gives testament, here and now, to a life fully lived. In that, she chooses the words of Plath to encapsulate the culminating moment, which was delivered by Hicklin herself in performance (previously captured on video).
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.
I am, I am, I am.”
(from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath)
She is.
And we are the richer and the luckier for it.
Kenton Stevens, Theatre Now
