It’s not hard to see why Robyn Nevin should have made such a beeline for Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, or why the Melbourne Theatre Company should be hosting this production. This one-hander about the evolution of grief had been done with remarkable success in New York by Vanessa Redgrave, and it was clearly a star turn for an older actress.
Joan Didion, that supremely imaginative chronicler of modern America, had seen her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, die before her eyes. But seeing was not, in the deeper sense of emotional credibility, believing. And so the distinguished journalist and bracingly sceptical intellect set about consoling herself with the delusions of magical thinking, in the way she had learned that primitive societies had, from anthropology class. If the god is appeased the rain will come; if I don’t give away my dead husband’s shoes he will come back.
As a book, The Year of Magical Thinking can seem like a bridge too far in a world where death can come so randomly and so pointlessly. It can look on the page so transparently like an attempt to wrest meaning from shattering catastrophe that the reader backs away and stops reading, because the effect is so much of gilded diary jottings that the atmosphere of pity and terror is too raw, not to say overwhelming.
Joan Didion has made a fair fist of turning The Year of Magical Thinking into a set of arias of lamentation (and mystification) for the female voice. The narration recapitulates Didion’s uncomprehending and horrified response to her beloved husband’s death with a sort of spellbinding raconteur’s skill that is laced with enough irony and jokes to keep the audience’s sense of overwhelming desolation if not at bay, then at least in tension with the fact that the woman who suffered unbearable loss has gone on to create this rather dazzling exercise in ironic self-awareness.
The upshot is not a dramatic masterpiece, though it is, in its way, a masterly adaptation of a remarkable piece of writing, and one which might have seemed on the face of it too harrowing to be turned into a drama. The play by necessity sharpens the rich articulate worldliness of Didion’s voice and makes it the normative baseline from which the lyrical derangement of grief can take flight.
It would be wrong to see it as a middlebrow piece of stagecraft, though it does partake of the not unattractive paradox of a New Yorker stance of sensibility and style tearing a passion to tatters.
When Vanessa Redgrave played Joan Didion it must have been like the flame of the great performer taking the great writer as her moth, as it inevitably was when Peter O’Toole did Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell on the London stage. There is something transfiguringly glamorous about being impersonated by a star, more particularly when you are a persona emanating from a typewriter and not Mother Teresa or Che Guevara, mighty in the imaginings of collective memory. It may be that The Year of Magical Thinking, the show, is Joan Didion’s ultimate valentine to the atrocity of her experience and the resilience with which she has stared it down.
If so, we have done it differently here in Australia. This Sydney Theatre Company production, which was first seen a year ago during Robyn Nevin’s last year as the head of the STC, has a starry director in Cate Blanchett, but Robyn Nevin herself is a character actress from way back.
Of course, she is an Australian actress of great accomplishment — as well as a master of directorial naturalism — but she is not a lyrical tragedienne who can also easily negotiate the regalities of high comedy in the manner of Vanessa Redgrave.
Her acting strives for authenticity and for the grit and leathery reality of the everyday. She can do rage and fierceness and the carnages that are visited on common life. In her famous production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Genevieve Picot as Olive seemed to channel this aspect of Nevin. It’s that fiery plainness that you get in Careful, He Might Hear You and which you could imagine Robyn Nevin bringing to the part of Henny in The Man Who Loved Children. If ever there was a Drover’s Wife of an actress, it’s Nevin. So stoical, so hard-bitten, so scathing.
Much of this glints and burns through the circumlocutory ironies of The Year of Magical Thinking. She is good at establishing the tough, beset woman beneath the mandarin of letters. What was less evident on opening night was an ability to handle the ravishing shifts of tone, the capacity to conjure unspeakable intensities of feeling and flaunt them like scattered coins that this part would require if the play was to realise its full potential.
It would be fascinating to compare it with Helen Morse, a more notably lyrical actor, who has been doing the play at the Perth Festival under Kate Cherry’s direction. This Cate Blanchett production is very effective, and the sea of waiting room chairs Nevin glides through and round, as if they were impediments to selfhood, work for all their inelegance.
But there isn’t in Nevin’s performance, for all its impressive toughness, that thirst for feeling that might transfigure Joan Didion in the direction of tragedy. Some people will think this is an admirable restraint. I didn’t.
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