Adapting a non-fiction story can be filled with challenges. Particularly when it's 30 years old story of a mother dealing with her son's schizophrenia in the face of a medical establishment which can't help her or him,legal and emotional challenges, and the impacts on her partners and her other children. Veronica Nadine Gleeson's adaptation attempts to capture all of Anne Devenson's story of her relationship with her son Jonathan, from his birth to his far-too-soon death, in a way that feels episodic yet connected as her stable intellectual life gets disrupted by a young man who has no control over what his own mind is telling him. There's a deliberate attempt to keep Jonathan's perspective as apparent as Anne's, down to Stephen Curtis' set which is an apparently simple orderly dining room with shelves and large table, all surrounded by white, which Jonathan continously draws graffiti on. It's a spectacular demonstration of both the beauty and the disruption which Jonathan brings into Anne's life, and it's told compassionately and carefully, accumulating detail over the two-and-a-bit hours of the show.
Nadine Garner narrates as Anne, balancing the rational journalist and the compassionate mother attempting to help her son in a performance full of warmth and intelligence. Tom Conroy as Jonathan has a role that allows him to disturb and invite empathy, as we see how his own mind tears him apart and leaves him desperate and isolated even when surrounded by friends and family. Elsewhere, Sean O'Shea plays two different husbands with different approaches, Deborah Galanos plays various friends and advisers with just the right amount of detached engagement, and Raj LaBade and Jana Zevedeniuk play Anne's other children whose own journeys are inevitably sidelined by the chaotic Jonathan.
I don't know that this adaptation exactly brings out why we need this story now, which is what, for my mind, an adaptation needs to do - yes, mental health continues to be a challenge our medical system is woefully incapable of handling well and the family bond is ever green, but despite a few spectacular coups-de-theatre, I found myself not entirely captured by this one - not sure whether it's the grab-bag distallation of the book, whether it's the attempt to tell both Anne's story and superimpose Jonathan's in it, or whether it's simply that I'm not a parent and I probably never will be. I was pleased to get a chance to see Garner on stage as she normally works out of Melbourne, and I was never bored, but I don't think I came out particularly enlightened either. So this works out for me as "well done for what it is, but I'm not sure I'm a big fan of what it is".
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