“The bitter pill is the one that is going to make you better,” says actor Noel Hodda, explaining the power and the purpose of The Street Theatre’s production of David Harrower’s play BLACKBIRD.
The play is sandwiched between two David Williamson plays as part of The Street’s Drama Stimulus Package, and while Harrower’s controversial play seems the odd one out, the creative team behind it – director David Atfield, actors Hodda and Nell Shipley, and Street Theatre Artistic Director Caroline Stacey – hope that Canberra audiences will respond to the troubling questions Blackbird asks.
The play, which won the Olivier in 2007, beating out blue-ribbon stalwart Tom Stoppard’s offering, Rock’N’Roll, is a real-time meeting between Ray (Hodda) and Una (Shipley), who fifteen years ago ran away together.
The story is “in the present,” says Hodda, but Ray and Una are “caught in the past. One of the issues that is raised is how things can be seen differently when you look back on them.” Shipley agrees. “Because there’s been such a gap, 15 years… inevitably there’s a recalibrating of the memories, there’s differences of opinion that have festered. What actually happened can only be known by these two people.
“So where does reality sit? What was real?” asks Shipley.
The ambiguity of “what was real”, and the festering memories uncovered during the play, turn on the “inappropriate relationship” between Ray and Una, for although the two are now both adults, their relationship began when Una was only 12-years-old. In the age of Bill Henson and increasing hysteria – whether justified or no – over child pornography, Blackbird asks questions not only of what was real but “what was wrong”, as Shipley says. These questions are “brave… and timely,” says director David Atfield.
“I do think people are going to find this quite confronting, even offensive, mainly because of how it treats the male character.”
“It doesn’t take the stereotypical goody-baddy, victim-villain scenario that a lot of plays and films about this subject do. These are two very complex individuals… both with problems and faults,” explains Atfield. “It’s not a simple black and white piece.”
Harrower’s grey-scale ambiguity will be compounded by the production’s staging. Atfield and designer Imogen Keen will be presenting the play in the round, breaking the easy divide between audience and performer. Such a staging will, by necessity, give each audience member a different perspective – a different interpretation – of the events of the play. Shipley agrees that the performance space is “a confrontational arena”, but that it works with the play’s ambivalences.
“There is an awareness of the outside,” says Shipley, “of other people’s opinions and interpretations layered on top.”
What comes through most clearly in talking to the Blackbird creative team is this metaphorical language of layers and levels, and of the idea that what seems wrong or right is not necessarily, or not only, what seems to be so on the surface.
“This play is on one level a very disturbing story of an inappropriate relationship,” says Hodda, but “on another level it’s a love story.”
The complexity of Ray and Una, and of their relationship, means that simple questions of right and wrong need to be shelved in order to come to an understanding of the individual stories and struggles. In a fundamentalist world such as ours, that can be confronting.
“It’s not easy, it’s not simple,” says Shipley. Hodda realises that such radical ambiguity that Ray and Una’s relationship entails means that the play is “not going to be easy to watch.”
“It’s much easier to paint things in black and white, to try to fit things into patterns,” says Atfield, who hopes that this production of Blackbird will “break people’s expectations on all sorts of issues, including that very radical issue of child sexual abuse.”
Atfield cites recent films like 2006’s Little Children, which “looked at people who had committed sex crimes, but painted them as full individuals, not just as villains. I think society needs to do that too, if we want to actually resolve this problem,” says Atfield.
“If we don’t look at the underlying reasons of why they’re doing it, we’ll never actually get rid of the problem.”
So why, in a town where it’s hard enough to get audiences to front up to any live theatre show, program such a difficult and confronting play? Artistic Director Caroline Stacey explains the impetus behind The Street Theatre’s 2009 season.
“One of the things that we’re trying to do here is build a drama, text-based programme, that there’s a loyal and interested audience for. “Nationally you’ll find that it’s one of the hardest genres to develop an audience for, and yet it’s one of the places where stories are told, and current issues are addressed.”
Which is what makes Blackbird “an important work to do,” says Stacey.
The moral and ethical questions it raises are “completely and totally at the heart of not just cultural practice… with all of the stuff around Bill Henson,” but also relate to issues raised about child sexual abuse in the Catholic and Anglican churches. The play addresses “moral and ethical dilemmas that are very much at the heart of our concerns. It asks a lot of questions but doesn’t have any easy answers.”
The play should “promote discussion”, says Hodda, but Shipley adds that it is also entertaining. “But it’s got to be both, that’s the challenge. People want reality and solidity,” says Hodda, adding that this play, rather than some cream-puff piece of pure entertainment, is “the popular success of the world. It touches right on the zeitgeist.”
Part of what the Blackbird creatives hope for is that responsibility for answering Blackbird’s troubling questions will “continue out the door, [with] arguments in cars on the way home,” says Hodda.
“And if theatre isn’t doing that, then we’ve got a problem.”
The Street Theatre presents David Harrower’s Blackbird at Street 2 from June 19 to July 4 @ 8pm. Tix from $15 to $29. Phone The Street box office on 6247 1223 for details on how to book.
