Melbourne Reviews

In the late 90’s, playwright Daniel Keene teamed with director Ariette Taylor to launch The Keene/Taylor Theatre Project. Across 5 years, and with an inaugural season emanating from a Brotherhood of St Laurence storeroom in Fitzroy, this independent theatrical venture created 33 new works that were heralded for amplifying the voices of those seldom heard in creative spaces. Written with astonishing insight and the kind of empathy that must engender pain, Mother has its roots deep within that Brotherhood storeroom.

Daniel Keene is without question one of Australia most accomplished stage writers and in creating a work for one of our finest and most respected actors, something quite exceptional has been gifted.

Christie is a woman on the periphery, a shadow that exists in the half light of retail doorways, on or under a bridge, riding an all-night tram. A homeless woman, tragically familiar yet inconveniently in our thoughts more briefly than she troubles our vision. Christie understands her helplessness and that those who walk by are far too late to ever bring about change – she stopped wearing shoes long ago and her hardened soles no longer feel. The arrival at a place of predicament is a person’s story and Christie’s is a tough one. Intergenerational trauma, inherited poverty, abuse, pain and its readily available relievers – the alchemy of a life lost. Daniel Keene describes the climate that fosters a work like Mother as “living in a time when for many people the most vulnerable amongst us are objects of scorn”. Christie is to be blamed; her vulnerabilities cited as examples of weakness and failure, personal failure of course, never that of the collective. 

Touring for over three years in Mother, Noni Hazlehurst and Christie are finally in Melbourne and the superlatives across the promotional material are genuinely to be believed. This is compelling and beautiful theatre all elements of which have been meticulously crafted. This is a performance committed to a place unknown and shared with astounding generosity and conviction. This is writing from a crucial place of difference making, of insight and beckoning us not to look away. This is a stage so beautifully lit that we are both comforted and confronted, and this is an incredible soundscape that delivers startling realism to Christie’s day to day.  

This work reminds us that present fortune is always at the mercy of broken systems and that societies distance from compassion will always be greater than its proximity to blame. Mother is a remarkable piece of skilled and beautiful writing performed by a national treasure. Noni Hazlehurst has lived in our living room; she’s read to us, she’s played with us, she’s sung to us – she’s ‘Mothered’ us. She’s our family and here, though wretched and ragged on stage, is a tangible connection to childhood and kindness making the experience of Mother one that is profoundly and deeply resonant.

See this.