It’s time for Mattie Baker (Lily Harper) to leave home and go to college, and Mattie’s mum (Trudy Pearson) is helping her pack. Or rather, she is doing the packing while the energetic and easily distracted Mattie is zooming around in a cape, listening to songs and playing with her imaginary friends (Michiel van Echten and Mycah Keall). In the end the only thing she tries to pack is a lifesize cutout of Shane from Westlife.

As many mothers of a teenage girl would attest, “most of my life is talking to doors.” But Mattie and her Mum are a couple of smart cookies, and their connection and sense of humour is obvious. The second youngest of six, Mattie is the last to leave home and her Mum is taking a trip down memory lane, while folding socks and searching for clean underwear. [More] 

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The first thing to say is that this is a delightful and insightful show that anyone who ever encounters a person with Down syndrome should see – and isn’t that all of us?  

Ten years and one month ago, Myrtle Theatre Company (from Bristol UK) brought Up Down Boy to the Capital E National Arts Festival. Now the Up Down Project* has brought Up Down Girl – the adaptation that premiered in Palmerston North one year and one month ago – to Circa Two.

The co-directors, Nathan Mudge and Michiel van Echten, were already running a drama group for neurodiverse people in Palmerston North when one of their number, Lily Harper, related the joy and dismay she had experienced watching an episode of her favourite TV programme (Shortland Street – you may have heard her talk about this on RNZ National). A pregnant character had discovered her baby-to-be had Down syndrome. “Finally, someone on TV was going to be just like [Lily],” the Directors’ Note tells us, but: “The mother then lamented ‘a miserable life with a munted baby’ and the father suggested she abort the pregnancy.”

That was the catalyst for adapting the British play, “as a way of sharing a different point of view.” Its development was enhanced by “Lily’s wild imagination on the rehearsal room floor” as she made her mark on role of Mattie.

The whole team has certainly made it their own, relocating it in Palmerston North with reference to a time the large family lived on the East Coast, before returning to the Palmy where Mattie would have better access to the services and opportunities that would give her “the best chance,” as her mother puts it.

Trudy Pearson carries the role of Mum (Odette in the original play) with an ease that belies the welter of words she has to deliver. Provoked by the pressure of packing for Mattie, who is about to leave home for a residential vocational college that will give her – well both of them – independence, her stream of consciousness flows with energy, purpose and a well-modulated range of emotions. As she thinks out loud, chivvies Mattie into getting ready and expresses her utterly understandable frustrations, their life stories to date and the complex nature of this mother-daughter relationship becomes apparent.

Meanwhile Lily Harper has a ball inhabiting the world according to ‘Super Mattie’. She owns every moment of Mattie’s inventive strategies for putting off the moment of departure. Mattie’s thoughts and feelings are truly expressed, she has touching moments of total attentiveness to her mother’s concerns, and she rocks out some impressive moves while lip-syncing pop songs – and singing along beautifully with one. Punctuating the roller-coaster ride, her ‘taking flight’ as ‘Super Mattie’ becomes a recurring motif. In all, a thoroughly uplifting performance.

Mattie’s highly active imagination is manifested with flair by Michiel van Echten and Mycah Keall, who variously operate spooky and comical OHP-projected shadow play, pop up as remembered people and fantasy characters, and provide lively singing-and dancing back-up to Mattie’s big numbers. (These roles were not in Up Down Boy and they add greatly to the overall dynamic.)

Designer Ian Harman’s cluttered bedroom set, costumes and props speak volumes about Mattie’s progress through life. Isadora Lao’s lighting design and operation facilitates our engagement with the play’s objective realities and subjective experiences.

Co-directors Nathan Mudge and Michiel van Echten have master-minded a richly layered theatrical experience that – dare I suggest – surpasses the original production in meeting its objectives. It deserves to tour far and wide. Meanwhile it’s on at Circa until 1May.  
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*The Up Down Project is a performance collective formed with Wellington’s disability community. It aims to seek out and create stories by people with disabilities (as well as stories about them). They (Nathan Mudge and Michiel van Echten) can be contacted at updownprojectnz@gmail.com. 

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Nineteen-year-old Mattie Butler is supposed to be packing her bag for college. With a penchant for improvising flying capes out of bathroom towels and adopting superhero poses, ‘Super’ Mattie doesn’t seem too concerned about completing her task, or that she is leaving in an hour.  

It’s Mum who chivvies her along, making sure her daughter has enough of the necessaries, while weeding out any extraneous bumf. Mattie’s life-size cardboard cut-out of Westlife’s Shane Filan is clearly one of the latter.

Instead, it’s the sensible and functional items – socks and underwear, a family photograph and a couple of favourite CDs that find their way into the bag.

Mattie has Down syndrome, and attending college will be the first real foray into a world that will restrict any of her frequent retreats into fantasy as a coping mechanism. This enthralling and entertaining hour provides a detailed reflection about what Mattie has meant to her Palmerston North family of two adults and five other siblings.

While Trudy Pearson as Mum delivers most of the information in what is largely a one-sided duologue, Lily Harper’s Mattie steals the limelight. No stranger to performance – Harper has presented for Attitude TV – but in her first stage play, she draws on own her Down syndrome experience to emotionally and physically convey the endearingly irrepressible Mattie.

Pearson carries her character with confidence, exemplifying exactly how a mother will go into bat against ‘the system’ for the welfare of her child.

The pair share a great connection, with selected memories dramatised as shadow-scapes on the wall of Mattie’s bedroom, or acted out with choreographed assistance from Michiel van Echten and Mycah Keall.

However, while the adaptation of the play from its UK roots to New Zealand vernacular is excellent in terms of culture and place, it still comes with an inbuilt ‘mum-splainy’ imbalance. This is really Mum’s story about Mattie rather than Mattie’s story about Mattie.

More from Mattie’s perspective, especially about the social acceptance downside of being Down, would have given the character a louder and more appreciable voice. Maybe Mattie doesn’t want to be trained in the menial tasks listed on the college brochure and aspires to a more creative future for herself. That’s an avenue the script never explores, and hopefully a coming sequel to this play will.

There is no denying the moving final scene though. Mattie’s departure is enough to leave many in the audience with tell-tale traces of moistness about their eyes.

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