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Notes from an interview with Deborah Mailman
The following interview is a useful primary source for teachers and students
studying the Stage 6 Drama Syllabus core study, Australian Drama and Theatre,
Topic 2: Contemporary Australian Theatre Practice. The interview provides
valuable insights into the background of the play.
Deborah Mailman co-directed The Seven Stages of Grieving with Wesley
Enoch. Deborah performed the work for audiences in Australia and internationally.
This interview, conducted in 2001 by Michael Anderson (former Creative Arts
Consultant, Drama, Curriculum Support Directorate) and Lee Gough (former drama
teacher, Moorefield Girls High School), focuses on the development of the work
and its performance.
How
did Seven Stages of Grieving develop?
Why
did you use the seven stages metaphor in the play?
How
did the form of the play develop?
What
will be missed if this play is not seen in performance?
How
did London audiences respond to the play?
What
is this play like to perform?
Would
a new production of the play be different?
Is
this a very personal story?
How
are stories told in Aboriginal culture?
What
is the best way to approach this play?
How
should teachers approach the play with students?
Are
we close to being a reconciled nation?
How did Seven Stages of Grieving develop?
Seven Stages of Grieving started back in 1993 when Wesley's grandmother passed away. The whole sense of the grief and the family, the gathering of community and the passing on of an elder was the starting point for the story. Wesley came to me and said, “I’m interested in creating a performance that looks at the grieving process in Aboriginal communities”.
We wanted to create theatre that explored different forms, that had something to say, that was important to us and that created an opportunity for us to showcase our craft and so we looked at Dr Kubler Rosse's Five Stages of Dying.
At university, Wesley was taught about the seven phases of Aboriginal history through his cultural studies and so we used them as a backbone, as an emotional and a political kind of backbone of the piece which we built from.
We started off by presenting a twenty minute performance piece which was presented by La Boîte-Shock of the New. We got feedback from that and we applied for funding.
Eventually we found funding for a full-time rehearsal process, where we developed it into a one hour show and eventually into a published script. It took, all up, about three to four years to get it to national and international standard of touring. It was a long, long process from inception through to script.
Why did you use the seven stages metaphor in the play?
Well, it was Wesley's idea. Basically it was used as the spine of the piece. We just wanted to have a reference to start with. We didn't want to make it a conscious journey, so it was basically something to build from, exploring the idea of grief and what happens when a person dies.
We went through those stages in rehearsal and looked at developing that emotional context. We paralleled that with the seven phases of Aboriginal history and found that they fit. You have denial, isolation and anger along with dreaming and genocide, so you had the political kind of history and the emotional kind of place that they fitted, if that makes sense. Yeah, so that was the starting point for all of that.
How did the form of the play develop?
We set up a rehearsal process (on a part-time basis) where we just brainstormed, sat in a room and thought, OK, grief, what is it? We “physicalised” our ideas, we improvised the ideas, we went away and wrote, came back and built on top of that, so we didn't actually have a structure. It was very much a stab in the dark at ideas and trying to form some kind of coherent story.
Eventually
we got a dramaturg, Hillary Beaton, in the next stage of the rehearsal process,
which was developing it into a one-hour show. She was the third eye and helped
us to clarify the story, but initially we weren't quite sure what form it was
going to take. It evolved naturally through the rehearsal process.
What will be missed if this play is not seen
in performance?
I don't know if it's about missing anything, I think it's actually about the
strength of connection that the students will have to the story.
Like any text, I think there is something that may not resonate because you are simply reading words. An example of this is at the beginning of Seven Stages of Grieving. What is described in the script is a faint noise of a cry, that grows into a sob, that grows into a wail; a light reveals an Aboriginal woman alone with her grief. Because this is such an emotional beginning that sets up the weight and depth of the woman, to simply read it without having any connection to that emotion, it does lose its effect.
There may be moments in the story that may not resonate as strongly, but that is just like any play that you approach without having any sense of performance or having seen a performance. But I mean everything that is visual in the story is described in the script, so hopefully there is enough there to kind of allow the student to have a bit of an imagination about the story.
How did London audiences respond to the play?
Fantastic. It was really interesting to take it to a place like London, because at the time One Nation was very much finding its strength as a political party, so people over there were very knowledgeable about all that and how it was creating a lot of anger and frustration here. And so they were really interested in a different story that was coming from Australia because they had heard about Pauline Hanson and all that and not so much about the Aboriginal story.
We had sold-out houses over in London, which was great, and people were just coming up and being refreshed. I don't know if refreshed is the word, but just saying “amazing”, “this is an amazing story that needs to be told”.
In Zurich it was a little bit different, in that a lot of the audiences couldn't pick up on the nuances of the English language so there are a lot of things that I am sure they didn't get. But I think the emotional journey is probably the connection that audiences have with the piece.
What is this play like to perform?
It's harrowing when you have done it for the umpteenth time; to make it fresh and to allow the audience to see it as a first performance.
At the beginning, as it says in the script, I have to cry and wail and sob; that can't be done half-heartedly. That has to be felt. It's a very difficult state to get into and to begin a story. It's pure emotion and it's very difficult to get there sometimes, but you know, it's my job as an actor to get there.
Would a new production of the play be different?
It should be different, because if a different actor or different director steps into that position they are coming from a different place from Wesley or myself. And the great thing about Grieving and with any play is that it is open for interpretation, as it should be. It would be really interesting to have a different creative team come in and, you know, have a different way of telling the story.
Is this a very personal story?
One of the stories called The March was taken directly from an experience Wesley had in Brisbane at the time we were writing Grieving.
A young man by the name of Daniel Yock died, and the community just came out with so much anger, frustration and grief about this young artist who had never done anything wrong with the law, who had direction, who had dreams and was an artist. He was well respected in the community and he died in police custody. That's a very grey area and so this march happened, a silent march with thousands and thousands of people in the streets of Brisbane and it's described in The March. It was silent and the only sound was the sound of feet pounding on the pavement and above there were helicopters. There was a sense from the wider community of wanting to make this into something that was violent and blacks protesting again, but it was very much a silent march about respecting the passing on of a young artist and so that story was written from a very, very personal account.
Wesley was in that march and kind of was just part of this amazing community grief. So I mean things like that, if you haven't been part of that, I don't know, it may not resonate as strongly, but I think Grieving has an area to be reworked, in that sense, when someone is approaching it from another way.
How are stories told in Aboriginal culture?
In Aboriginal culture, Muri culture, painting, dance, song, language are an integration of all these forms. It is what explains the world, it is how the younger people learn about the world from the elders and that's how stories are passed on and so it's commonplace to be told through dance and painting and language all at the same time. It's a sense of completeness, there's no division, no sort of separate entity of anything. It's all about completeness and wholeness. It's how our culture survives through that.
So we wanted Grieving to explore that traditional sense of storytelling in a contemporary form such as theatre. An example of this is the set, which is described as a block of ice, a grave and a mound of dirt, which is a very contemporary form. We wanted to work the story, shifting between highly stylised performances such as “photograph story” and “invasion”, and a traditional style of storytelling, e.g. purification, which is cleansing, smoking out of the space. We were very conscious of wanting to integrate traditional and contemporary.
What is the best way to approach this play?
Grieving can be approached like any other text, in that you can look at it as a play. You can discuss its dramatic form if you can discuss its content, and you can look at its dramatic elements, but I think you know that when you are looking at its content you have to be aware of the issues that affect the Aboriginal people, Aboriginal history and everything that comes with that. In order to create a healthy debate with students you can't go in blindly when you are discussing Grieving, I think you need to raise an awareness about those issues.
How should teachers approach the play with students?
Everyone will come to Grieving from a different place, and it's OK to do that, I think, because it is a play and it needs to be approached like any other play, although it is specifically about an Aboriginal perspective. I think improvising with the ideas from the play, rehearsing certain scenes, it's about how you can connect to the story, it's about trying to find a way in which you can connect to a story and if you can do that, then that's great.
That's the thing about Grieving, it deals with a lot of universal themes outside of just being specifically about Aboriginal when you are looking at grief and when you are looking at family. You know, when you are looking at a set feeling of loneliness or confusion or you know there are the bigger things that a student can kind of log into. We all feel that.
Are we close to being a reconciled nation?
There is so much healing that needs to happen in the community, and that takes time.
Like we say in Grieving, everything has a time and everything has a place and reconciliation, whatever that means, the true sense of it, is a very long, long process and we have to develop a two-way conversation and an acceptance which is very hard for a lot of people to do. It's very hard even within the Aboriginal community. How do we accept this history, how do we go past that in order to move on? A lot of people can't do that at the moment because the scars are very deep and very strong.
Look at the stolen generation at the moment and the ridiculous comments that come out of the mouths of politicians when they say it never existed or only ten percent of the Aboriginal population can be classified as a generation of stolen people. That just resurfaces hurt again, and pain. It's a long process and I don't think there is a time that we can place on that.
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