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THEATRE: 10 AUGUST 2018
By TONI CARROLL
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The Almighty Sometimes, by Kendall Feaver | Directed by Lee Lewis
Griffin Theatre Company (www.griffintheatre.com.au) | SBW The Stables Theatre, Kings Cross, Sydney | Until 8 September
While I revelled in the nostalgia that was the Puberty Blues mini-series a couple of years ago, little did I know that I was watching a star in the making.
Strong words? I guess. Also a big call. But I’m making it.
Brenna Harding co-starred as the Gabrielle Carey to Ashleigh Cumming’s Kathy Lette. She played the quiet friend. She played it so well I thought she’d been typecast.
The Almighty Sometimes proved to me otherwise.
In the Griffin’s latest exceptional Aussie play, she plays Anna, a young woman who has been medicated for undefined mental health issues since she was 11 years old. Now as an 18 year old — a legal adult with agency over her own body and how she reigns over it — she’s grappling with a sense of identity that may have been stripped from her by the decisions her mother and therapist made all those years ago.
She’s discovered notebooks of writing from her youth. It was genius, but bleak, and became more Stephen-King-like when her father died/left. Those notebooks, plus an experimental jump out the window, prompted her mother to consult a child psychologist. So began a journey of medications and numbness that made it easier for her single mother’s peace of mind.
Anna’s discovery of the notebooks reminds her of how creative she was, writing easily and fluidly. She tries to recapture that but the medicated words just won’t come. She needs to find out who she is. Who doesn’t at the age of 18? But her search is more complicated because her true self has been masked by medications for years.
Or has her true self been released by the medications?
Here is the crux of the play.
Be prepared to grapple with the big questions. What makes us ‘us’? How authentic is our ‘self’? How much right do we have to just be our authentic selves when the manifestation of that self interferes with the well-being of others?
Have we lost sight of what it is to ‘be a kid’? I used to watch my own children and thought that if I were to wander around and interact with the world with such awe and wonder and complete lack of inhibition as an adult, I’d be locked up. But are we locking them up in a bland world of normality by over-medicating them for maladies and syndromes that could be nothing more than intense humanness?
Or are we lucky that now we can recognise real mental illness in our kids and are helping them to reach their potential by smoothing out the angst of mental-health issues?
Playwright Kendall Feaver deftly handles these big issues and questions with a balanced hand. At no time did The Guest or I feel that we’d been pushed into one side or the other, to condemn or to applaud. In fact, I was left with the overwhelming feeling that this is such a complex issue perhaps there is no answer.
Depressing, but true.
Was Anna simply reacting as a creative, imaginative, emotional, pre-pubescent 11-year-old when her father left, expressing her grief in the only way she knew how? Or did that event tip her over into the mental illness that had been bubbling away all her short life?
Harding is brilliant as Anna. She uses her now legal status to stop the medications, and Harding brilliantly depicts the slide from medicated young woman to unmedicated child, pushing away her psychologist (the glorious Penny Cook), her mother (Hannah Waterman) and her new boyfriend (Shiv Palekar).
Anna’s journey back to her own ‘self’ and beyond is heartbreaking to watch. Harding never once plays crazy. She inhabits the character of Anna and with a nuanced touch gives a real young woman grappling with her demons.
This really is a must-see.
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