Hope Kennedy Smith has written a show as a contribution to the Atawhai Festival that evokes the dull squirm of mental illness as it might sit in the corporate workplace.  This carries an uneasy reflection on the universal state of unwellness that might pervade the isolated existence of any young person who finds themselves trying to do the right thing by taking a job in an office – whether as a Customer Service rep for a large company on the phones, or at a computer desk – and questioning the time they give away to the corporate world. 

The Atawhai Festival, created by Borni Te Rongopai Tukiwaho, has centred mostly at Te Pou theatre in New Lynn, but the Tiny Theatre at Garnet Station is well purposed to host small theatrical works, and works in development, as an ‘off-off-off-Broadway’ kind of space. 

With a very simple set, and support from director Patrick Graham, Kennedy Smith puts words in the air that reflect the meaningless oppression of the workforce without creativity, without solution and without escape. 

On the wall behind her are the many tasks she is set to achieve. In this corporation, the nature of the work is to suffer and any real-world context of what exactly the job is, is ignored amid a sea of manila folders:  Shame;  Under Achieving;  Irrational Fears;  Wasting Time;  Insomnia … 

The show is demure and linear, taking the almost stupefied protagonist to the brink of despair, but even the despair is couched in a banality that falls short of any emotive turmoil.

I would suggest that it is a difficult task to make theatre about mental health.  The jury is still out on the meanings and impetus of the words we use in discussing mental health issues, because the whole gamut of mental health has not been a regular discourse – and that will be evident in the reasoning behind making a festival of this nature.  Atawhai means to show kindness, caring, and the Festival succeeds in its community and its willingness. I hope very much it becomes a regular occurrence.  

The Boss in Our Lives is very honest in its approach and its message, effectively reminding us that the main tonality of mental health issues, as they are suffered by a majority, is of suffocating and disabling rigidity.  It may lead to desperation and awful demanding choices, but the apparent aspects of mental health are often quiet. 

Quiet. ‘Not waving but drowning’ is the main social message I receive as a reminder from this show.  In fact drowning is a great analogy for this warning because it also happens silently, and often when we least expect it.  

Between the worlds of anxiety as it exists in the personal and the corporate worlds, we may see a multitude of people who are suffering from mental health issues. But when issues are compounded, or when the supportive aspects of life – as in friends, family, creative endeavours – are missing, the protagonist turns inward rather than outward and a kind of push-me pull-you thought process invades her head.

A simple show to a simple purpose, it nevertheless provides some hefty food for thought.  I will refrain from critiquing the stagecraft, except to say that Jaqui Whall and Sarah Mules host a great presence on the edge of the stage and their further involvement in the dynamic of the show would probably enhance Hope Kennedy-Smith’s performance. Conversely it’s possible the show could mould itself into a one-woman show. 

However I mostly see it as an existentialist nightmare, linear in context and absurd in its entrapment. And in the tradition of great existential constructs, it would be good to see further development in character and character relationships, even if they are unsolvable and open-ended. A counterpart of joy does emerge very briefly, in the curtain call.

One tenacious aspect of this work is the theme of greater society’s responsibility in mental health.  A prominent theme that is bound to come out of a mental health festival of arts (which has included seminars, workshops and poetry performances as well as theatre) is a closer look at the membranes of responsibility and accountability between those suffering, the organizations designed to help them, and the wider community. 

This is a large topic but it’s important to get those conversations happening.  To extend the ‘corporation as psychopath’ theme – read Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, or watch the movie – there’s a powerful and important discourse to be had in New Zealand in direct relation to our political structures as they have unfolded over recent years.   

It’s been thrilling in the last couple of weeks to see so many New Zealanders at all financial levels and walks of life acting with a determination to have and continue those conversations.  Government certainly cannot be run as a corporation without a devastating effect on its people.  And people cannot run as a cog in the machine without mental health ramping up into a national disaster that rings bells for international watchdogs.  One thing that has been evident from Government in New Zealand over the last nine years is an attack on intellectual thinking, critical thinking in education and on the arts and performance industry. 

Borni Te Rongopai Tukiwaho’s Atawhai Festival puts a case for more drama in the theatre and a little less, perhaps, in the police cells, the jails, the overflowing hospital emergency wards, the funeral parlours, and the busting-at-the-seams mental health organisations of our country.

The Boss in Our Lives runs for one more evening at the Garnet Station Little Theatre, at 8pm tonight (Saturday the 28^th October).  

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