Theatre: Catastrophes

 Created and performed by Renée Newman and Ella Hetherington
Composer Ben Collins
Scenographer Mark Haslam
PICA
August 16 - 26

Renée Newman and Ella Hetherington (pic Aaron Claringbold)

I’m not the first person to point out the similarities between Renée Newman and Ella Hetherington’s Catastrophes and Jeffrey Jay Fowler and Sarah Reuben’s Hypotheticals (reviewed in From the Turnstiles on July 31), and they are revealing.

Newman, Hetherington, Fowler and Reuben are intelligent, aware and experienced theatre-makers, and while their approach to the subject of parenthood is, perforce, different (the former have and are experiencing it, the latter are contemplating it) the issues they deal with or imagine, the choices they make or imagine are much the same.

Which is hardly surprising, and very real. The decision to have children that once seemed about personal logistics underpinned by a universally held belief that it should, and would, happen, are now complicated by changing ambitions and ideas of fulfillment, the complexity of daily life and the dark fears of a world increasingly out of natural and human balance. Can I have a child becomes should I have a child?

Newman and Hetherington have had those children though, the now five-year-olds Frankie and Benji, so the stories in Catastrophes are vastly more immediate, corporeal (and, in a couple of memorably nightmarish comic situations, scatological) than those in Hypotheticals.

Frank, funny, scary and sad, they are a piece of verbatim theatre gathered over years of text messages, phone calls and conversations – Hetherington for much of them living in Sydney, Newman in Perth – structured as an interrogation by the two friends of each other and themselves.

It’s an effective method of compressing a cosmos of feelings and experiences into a tight 60 minutes of gripping theatre.

It’s also a great challenge for the two actors, just in its sheer compressed workload but, more importantly, in the expression of their personality and emotion. Hetherington and Newman, though, are more than up to the task. They both have phenomenal lucidity and energy, Hetherington in her speed and animation, Newman in stillness and poise. The contrast between them is the punctuation that gives this work form and impact.

That grammar is accentuated by Mark Haslam’s set of billowing sailcloth that rises and dives above and beyond the performers, and Ben Collins’ music of biological tempos and murmurings, a soundscape of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood.

Motherhood, mysterious, bewildering and consuming, emerges from Catastrophes as life’s great upheaval and the resolution of its drama.

And for mothers, despite the support of loving partners, despite the confidences of good friends, despite the overwhelming closeness of and to their children, it's a dance they do alone.