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The Guardian
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Helen Garner reflects on the ‘three worst weeks of my life' caring for a dying friend
When Helen Garner arrived at Sydney's Belvoir St theatre last Wednesday, she was worried the next two hours were 'going to be gruesome'. It was opening night of the adaptation of her 2008 novel, The Spare Room, based on her experience caring for a dying friend who came to stay with her. 'They were the three worst weeks of my life, they were just unforgettably dreadful,' Garner said in conversation with Jennifer Byrne at Belvoir on Monday evening. 'I came along [to opening night] feeling that I would find it unbearable to live those three weeks again.' After the show, she crawled into bed 'exhausted'. 'I don't sleep very well now, since I got old, but I got into bed and I slept without moving for nine hours,' Garner said. 'Seeing those three weeks played out on stage resolved something in me.' In The Spare Room, the narrator, Helen, gamely agrees to host her old friend Nicola when she flies from Sydney to Melbourne to attend a cancer clinic, without realising how close to death she is. As the novel opens, Helen is preparing her spare room for her friend – fresh sheets, plumped pillows, a new rug, flowers – confident in her capabilities as a hostess and carer. This is quickly punctured by Nicola's shocking frailty and poor health, and her irrational optimism about her prognosis and the clinic's dubious treatment protocol – which turns out to be Vitamin C injections and 'ozone baths'. There follows a power struggle: Helen's fierce love for her friend gives way to excoriating rage at her delusional positivity and refusal to admit she's dying, while Nicola stubbornly resists Helen's attempts to arrange proper pain medication and palliative care. 'I was cruel to her,' Garner confessed, reflecting on her experience with her friend (Jenya Osborne, who died in 2006), adding: 'When somebody's in a trance of craziness, you want to snap them out of it – and that can make you cruel, harsh.' Belvoir's artistic director, Eamon Flack, who adapted the novel for stage, said it was Garner's frank depiction of an older woman's rage that drew him to it. Garner said she was criticised for precisely this aspect of her novel when it was first published. 'Quite a few older men criticised it because they said it was too full of anger … I was kind of shocked, actually, [because] we rage against death; there's a lot of anger in us when death is in the room.' These criticisms upset her, she admitted. 'You don't want to [be seen as] 'Oh, you're so angry.' 'Why are you so angry, Helen? You're always angry' – that's something people [have said]. Even my grandson said this to me the other day: 'Hel, you're full of anger,'' she said, rearing back in mock rage: 'I said, 'How dare you!'' Not a single woman has criticised The Spare Room for its anger, Garner said; instead, many older women thanked her for depicting the carer's experience. One full-time carer told her: 'Helen, we all feel that anger. We're all tormented by it. Don't be ashamed of it. It's part of the whole thing. You have to go there.' In Belvoir's adaptation, Helen is portrayed by stage and screen veteran Judy Davis – a performance that Garner said she found 'shattering' to watch. 'But it took me a moment to get used to it,' she said. 'I don't go to the theatre much any more. I used to go a lot – I even used to be a theatre critic in the 80s – but now I just look at movies and stuff on TV. And I'd forgotten how actory [theatre] actors are. There's such a lot of big gestures, big movements, and I thought, 'Oh my God, could you just stand still for a moment?' … I kept saying 'I would never do that. I would never run across the room like that'.' Garner said she is not generally a fan of adaptations of her work – but neither does she feel the need to be heavily involved. 'I'm happy to hand stuff over,' she said. 'I wouldn't have wanted to have anything to do with this production … I would feel that I was useless.' One exception was Ken Cameron's 1982 film adaptation of her 1977 novel, Monkey Grip, where she happened to be on set the day they were filming a scene between Noni Hazlehurst and Colin Friels after his character had overdosed. 'He says 'Sorry, Nora', and in the book she says, 'You don't have to say that' – and so Noni [said the line] and I said, 'CUT! That's so wrong. She's in a rage.' But they were going to play it in this soppy, wet [way],' Garner said. 'I'm always glad that I was there.' When Byrne said she would like to see all of Garner's books adapted for stage, Garner retorted with characteristic frankness: 'I'm telling you now, I would hate that. I mean, God, there's so much shit in there.' The audience laughed appreciatively – but the author fixed us with a gimlet eye. 'And when I die, don't think anybody's gonna get in it then, either.' The Spare Room is at Belvoir St theatre, Sydney until 13 July
The Guardian
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Each night, a 14-year-old tasks two actors with playing her parents. They haven't seen the script
One evening in June last year, actor Ewen Leslie rocked up at Sydney's Belvoir St theatre to find out what show he was performing that night and meet his fellow actors for the first time. All he had was an email telling him to prepare his best Werner Herzog impression, to wear comfortable clothes, and to expect content around 'childhood, parenthood and mental health disorders'. A couple of hours later he was on stage, script in hand, being directed by a 13-year-old in front of an audience and struggling not to cry. The assignment was POV: a micro-budget, 70-minute show which follows a teenager named Bub, who is making a documentary about her parents. Each night, two adult actors who have not rehearsed or seen the script before step into the role of the parents, guided on stage by the young actor playing Bub. Actors who have played Bub's parents include Orange is the New Black star Yael Stone and Play School presenter Zindzi Okenyo. Leslie has gone toe-to-toe with actors including Richard Roxburgh and Nicole Kidman, and scaled peak roles such as Hamlet and Richard III – but POV presented a unique challenge. 'You have no control over it, and there was nothing I could do to prepare for it because I had no idea what I was about to go through,' he says. 'There's something scary about that, but also strangely empowering.' When actor Geraldine Hakewill asked him if she should participate in the show's upcoming season at Melbourne's Rising festival, he didn't hesitate: 'Do it'. Leslie had been hearing 'for years' about the show's creators, re:group: a collective of performance graduates from the University of Wollongong who have been using live cinema on stage for more than a decade, in shows such as Coil, a tribute to small town video stores in which they made a movie in real time. In POV, the teen and two adults 're-enact' Bub's experience as she tries to make a documentary about her parents but is stymied by their reluctance to participate. At the top of the play, the actor playing Bub (alternated by 14-year-olds Edith Whitehead and Mabelle Rose) explains the show's concept to the audience, then proceeds to direct her adult co-stars in a series of scenes. She's often filming the action at the same time, with a mixture of the live camera feed and pre-recorded footage screened on video monitors on either side of the stage. It's a slippery, meta-theatrical show, and between pondering the layers of artifice, enjoying the Werner Herzog references, and watching two unrehearsed actors thrown in the deep end, it's tremendous fun – and exhilarating, in the same way that watching good improv or a high wire act is. As in all the best theatre, there's something going on beneath the surface. Halfway through POV, it becomes apparent that Bub's parents' reticence about the documentary stems from her mum's mental health, which her dad doesn't want to talk about. It's what the show then reveals about adult-child dynamics and conversations about mental health that makes it particularly fascinating – and emotionally powerful. As POV's playwright Mark Rogers puts it: 'To put adult performers in that vulnerable position, where they're unrehearsed, mirrors the way in which you're unprepared, as a parent, to talk to your kid when crises happen.' As an audience member, the adult actors are your proxies: none of us are prepared; all of us are processing challenging scenarios and conversations at the same time, thinking: how would I – or have I – had these conversations in my own life? Experiencing this communally, within the safe structure of a show, is a special kind of magic unique to theatre. The genesis of the play was Rogers' own experiences and anxieties around parenthood, and his conversations with the show's director, Solomon Thomas, about growing up with a mum with bipolar. The resulting mix is a fictional story infused with lived experience. 'For a while the play was just about this fictional family who had a mum who was going through depression,' says Thomas, who was initially 'really scared' to expose this part of his life to the creative process. 'And then we kind of chipped away at it, and slowly I began to feed Mark parts of my life.' The key ingredient for the show was Edie Whitehead, one of the two Bubs, who re:group enlisted during early development. 'As soon as we saw her in the space with the camera, Sol and I just looked at each other and were like, 'This is it',' Rogers recalls. 'We were extremely lucky to find Edie.' Whitehead and Rose are the steady hands guiding the adult actors and audience alike through what is an emotional and cathartic experience. For Leslie, a father of two, the play's most challenging moment was a monologue in which he reads a letter to Bub. 'I found myself getting very moved by it. And because I wasn't prepared for it, I started to get quite emotional,' he says. 'I had this weird impulse to stand up and jump up and down – so I did that, to get out of my head for a sec so that I didn't start crying.' In another performance, the actor playing Bub's mum did burst into tears. How does Whitehead feel in those moments, encountering big emotions while being the person in charge? 'I actually really liked it,' she says, 'because it meant that they were really listening to the show and experiencing being that mum or dad. I thought that was really cool.' POV is on as part of Rising festival, Melbourne (4-8 June); Heartland festival, Parramatta (2-5 July); Bondi festival, Sydney (10-12 July)
