We at Time Out have been talking quite a bit about dying on stage of late. Though the casualty rate has been remarkably high this year, none of the plays we’ve mentioned have actually taken death as its main subject. The latest production from Griffin Theatre Company, though, goes straight to the heart of the topic.
With her doctors deciding to end her treatment, 56-year-old Pam (Linda Cropper) is left with the prospect of wasting away into nothing. It’s a long, drawn-out and expensive way to die. But there is another option – a way for Pam to face the the inevitable on her own terms and with dignity. With Don (Russell Kiefel), her husband of many years seated by her side, Pam slips quietly into a single bed and waits for the drugs to take effect.
But And No More Shall We Part doesn’t unfold in this linear fashion. As we see from the wall calendar in Pam and Don’s tiny upstage dining room, the events of the play take place over a single month (this month in fact). But it starts at the beginning of the end, with Pam already in bed and showing signs of slipping away. We flash back to two scenes from earlier in the month: the day Pam returns from what was supposed to be a routine check-up and the day Don leaves some contentious reading material for Pam to find in the kitchen. But we spend most of our time with the couple on this much-planned final evening. It’s like a book that keeps falling open to its final chapter.
Rest assured: it’s not an ‘issue’ play. Pam and Don make their respective, opposing cases on voluntary euthanasia and the ‘right’ way of doing things – plenty of fodder for post-theatre conversation – but playwright Tom Holloway isn’t merely chucking in his two cents’ worth. (If you really want an opinion piece disguised as theatre there's
another play for you.)
The audience enters the theatre through Pam and Don’s bedroom doorway. It’s lovely mise-en-scène, of course, by designer Victoria Lamb, but not just that. It adds to the profound sense that we’re visitors in this couple’s most private of spaces, prying on their most personal moments – and to the feeling that everything is so shockingly real. There’s something quite powerful about a hundred people in a room, all watching a woman setting a table, all joined together in wondering, ‘What is she thinking right now?’
Throughout the play, what Pam and Don don’t say is usually more interesting than what they do say. As Pam notes: “We’ve said it all before.” Holloway’s script allows Pam and Don plenty of time to breathe and think and worry and doubt and agonise without saying a word. In a way these skilfully deployed silences feel like the opposite of musical theatre, where characters burst into song when there’s something they’re burning to say. Here, it’s the very fact Pam and Don have so much to say that renders them speechless.
It’s the sort of thing that might have turned out to be a dirge, but director Sam Strong handles the gentle rhythms of Pam and Don’s relationship, silences and all, with his usual sensitivity and perceptiveness. There’s a particularly authentic moment when one of Pam and Don’s rows takes on a life of its own and propels them, shouting, from room to room, offstage, onstage, offstage and onstage again. It’s a nice touch – doubly so for the fact you couldn’t pull it off in any other theatre in Sydney.
Slightly more problematic is the connection with the audience, which at times is as fuzzy as the old photographs on display in the hallway. Why feel for Pam and Don when they themselves can’t seem to express how they feel for each other? These aren’t necessarily the glowing embers of a once-great romance, sure – but a few more moments of genuine warmth between Pam and Don (Cropper and Kiefel?) might make us appreciate what they’re losing just a little bit more.
Having said that, your impressions of a play will always be coloured by your own history. In And No More Shall We Part in particular, your experience will be shaped by whatever personal acquaintance with death you may have had in your life – and very likely your perceived proximity to your own. For this reviewer’s part, a sound that Linda Cropper emits late in the play – a sound of devastating realisation – was horribly, heart-wrenchingly familiar. Feel free – as many did on opening night – to help yourself from Pam and Don’s plush tissue box on your way out.
Whether you lose control of your tear ducts or not,
And No More Shall We Part is as intimate and tender a production as you're likely to see in Sydney. It’s also a stunning meditation on dealing with the unbearable. Oh, and for a play about writing your own ending, it’s good to see that the play
has an ending as powerful as
the magnificent Nick Cave track of the same name.
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