An unmissable chance to see two acting greats on stage together

The Age

16-06-2025

THEATRE
THE SPARE ROOM
Belvoir St Theatre, June 12
Until July 13
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½
As improbable as this seems when we gaze out upon a broken world, or scrutinise our own chaotic lives, living is the easy part. Dying is the trick: not the last breath itself, but the lead-up, once mortality grips you, and asks whether you fight or accept.
Helen Garner's confronting novel The Spare Room, peppered with a harsh, dry humour, tells of this. Written in the first person, and drawn from her own experience, it casts Helen as a woman in her 60s dealing with the muddled way of dying of her friend of 15 years, Nicola. Riddled with cancer, Nicola has come to Melbourne to stay in Helen's spare room while embracing alternative therapies. These become an option for the fighter (rather than the acceptor) when the real remedies have been exhausted.
Belvoir artistic director Eamon Flack has adapted Garner's book and directed this production starring two of our finest actors: Judy Davis (Helen) and Elizabeth Alexander (Nicola).
The challenge in adapting a first-person novel is escaping the narrator's exclusive viewpoint, and dramatising the moment – not what Helen tells us of that moment. In this, Flack only partially succeeds. Garner has Helen hold an almost entirely negative assessment of Nicola from only days into the latter's three-week 'treatment' (which involves bilious doses of intravenous vitamin C). She sees through the quackery, and becomes furious Nicola can't do the same.
But in a play we can't just have Helen's viewpoint: we need to understand Nicola more. Flack's overly reverential adaptation means we don't know what initially underpinned their friendship, and with our perception of Nicola being that of Helen, it's impossible to sympathise with Nicola's predicament. She becomes a cypher for victimhood. The play could have drawn us into their friendship, and then switched into a conflict over the dodgy therapy and how to deal with death.
The actors give it their best shot. Davis's compelling edginess, chiselled features and physical angularity are the polar opposite of Alexander's wafting, accommodating vulnerability in depicting Nicola's denial and conflict avoidance. The shame is that Alexander's not given more a chance to be a Nicola with an interior and suffering beyond Helen's knowledge because when she finally rages against her lot towards the end, the play is suddenly as electric as Davis has been all along.
Emma Diaz, Alan Dukes and Hannah Waterman are all admirable in multiple incidental roles, and Mel Page has created a fluid, naturalistic set. On-stage cellist Anthea Cottee realises Phoebe Pilcher's autumnal score, almost becoming more of a foil for Davis's character than Nicola.
Sit near the front if you can because vocal projection is not all it should be, and Flack has blocked the action deep on the stage, distant from the back rows. Nonetheless, he's caught the book's mix of tenderness and harshness, plus the chance to see Davis and Alexander together should not be missed.