A stoical Nevin charts the evolution of grief

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.