“Six actors deliver an outstanding ensemble performance in telling this story…None of this is achievable without a director with a thoughtful, artistic vision and Leticia Caceres has this in spades. “
Kate Stratford
4/5 paper trails
Ask any mother who her favourite child is and she will disclaim, saying she loves them all equally. Perhaps differently, but equally. The difference lies in need. Some children simply need more time and attention and when that need is magnified by a disability or health issue, the impact and ramifications can be shattering.
“Why should we be any more ashamed of an illness that affects out mind than of an illness that affects our body?” (Anne Deveson)
To call her the OMO Lady is to trivialise the amazing legacy she left. She was our nation’s first female talk-back broadcaster, a writer, an activist and campaigner for minority issues. Her work as a Royal Commissioner played a significant role in the decriminalisation of abortion, homosexuality and in the establishment of women’s refuges. When tragedy struck her personally with her son Jonathan’s schizophrenia and death, she went on a crusade of drug law reform and mental health.
And she documented everything.
She was Anne Deveson and Veronica Nadine Gleeson’s adaptation of her family memoir Tell Me I’m Here is the purview of Belvoir’s latest production.
Six actors deliver an outstanding ensemble performance in telling this story. Holding the centre are Nadine Garner as the beset Anne, and Tom Conroy as her suffering son Jonathan. Garner gives us a beautifully sculptured, sensitive image of a woman who desperately tries to hold together a life torn in pieces by the demands of career, relationships, family, fame, social commitment – and a child with schizophrenia. As her shattered son, Conroy’s physicality, despair and anguish are heart-rending and mesmerising. That Johnathan is able to so profoundly articulate his pain heightens the desperation, which is further underscored by Conroy’s mastery of movement elucidating Johnathan’s disconnectedness from his own body.
The mother /son chemistry between Garner and Conroy is palpable, resulting in a stage relationship both poignant and agonising.
Around them spin multiple characters – all concisely delivered with such definition and sympathy that the audience is never in any doubt with whom Anne and Jonathan are dealing. Deborah Galanos, Jana Zvedenik, Sean O’Shea and Raj Labade authentically inhabit the roles of siblings, lovers, doctors, nurses, police, friends with exquisite timing. Zvednik and Labade do a touching line in siblings torn between love and frustration. O’Shea is husband and lover and doctor and punk but his Roy, in particular, is delicately on the precipice. Galanos ability to shape shift into a myriad of personalities defies physics.
None of this is achievable without a director with a thoughtful, artistic vision and Leticia Caceres has this in spades. The work has been done to knit a cast and design team together with love and meaningful chorography. A set design (Stephen Curtis) works on multiple levels. A bespoke dining set and a wall of books and objects d’art are functional props as well as sending a message that mental illness does not discriminate when it comes to money and status. This space is, by the way, close to an actual replica of Deveson’s own living / dining room. The tokenistic Indigenous art on the wall turn out, on closer inspection, to be an image of brain synapse. On a deeper metaphoric level, the white minimalistic walls and floor provide a colouring-in book for Johnathan to draw his world. Children are not blank slates; they come with and continue to create their own colours and worlds with a perspective we often do not understand. Johnathan’s world is messy and chaotic and his siblings and mother live in it out of a sense of both love and duty.
Similarly, Veronique Benett’s lighting design makes it clear at any time whose world we are in. Shadows threaten in Johnathan’s world; in his absence there is a sense of clarity and at other times, sepia/ochre tones place us in the space between – the space Johnathan’s family must inhabit.
As the play’s text is somewhat one note, this level of creativity is necessary to overcome the limitations of its linear nature. It is after all, a memoir re-jigged for the stage. In lesser hands, the impact might have been melodramatic or flat. A story without twists and turns needs to be inventive in its telling so the “how” really matters here. Underpinning all the design and conceptual work is a strong sense of commitment to telling this story.
Mental illness does not discriminate—it affects people of all ages, genders, ethnicities, socio-economic and education levels. All are vulnerable. And when it hits a family, the emotional toll is extreme. There is still a social tendency to blame mothers for mental illness, as though it is their mothering which is to blame. A social attitude which leaves mums, of course, with feelings of guilt and inadequacy. But as Marg (Galanos) observes, if busy mothers and absent fathers were the cause of schizophrenia, then the whole world would be mad.
Kate Stratford, Theatre Now
