THE VOICE IN MY HEAD
Basement Theatre, Lower Greys Ave, Auckland
24/05/2016 - 04/06/2016
Production Details
Written and directed by Jodie Molloy
NEW MONOLOGUE SERIES TELLS FIVE UNIQUE WOMEN’S STORIES
“But oh how love would take me on a most perilous journey.”
A powerful and thought-provoking new one-woman theatre show will have its world premiere season at Auckland’s Basement Theatre from Tuesday 24 May, 2016. Starring Natalie Medlock (Shortland Street, Funny Girls, Yeti, The Almighty Johnsons, Auckland Daze) and written, directed and self-funded by Jodie Molloy (The Jaquie Brown Diaries, Play 2, Play 2.3), The Voice in My Head is a brand new work which confronts the topic of abortion through five unique and engaging monologues.
Five train rides will take the audience on a journey through a spectrum of comedy and tragedy, moving in space and time from Victorian era Europe to mid-Century Brooklyn, into the depths of WWII and from modern-day Melbourne to an imagined future in 2045. Each monologue reflects on the character’s perceptions and experience of relationships and motherhood and subsequently her morality. No character is the same and each piece is designed to illuminate different points of view not often explored.
Playwright Jodie Molloy developed the idea for The Voice in My Head while completing her Masters of Studies in Creative Writing at Cambridge University in the UK. The show is a first in what Molloy hopes will be a long-standing, annual series of monologue work, each instalment featuring a different female issue. “The inaugural piece features a narrative theme of ‘abortion’ and while this remains a contentious social issue, the work itself has no political statement to make other than encouraging dialogue. One in four New Zealand women have experienced abortion and yet it’s still not something we talk about naturally or easily.
“I’m exploring this common yet perniciously taboo experience from the perspectives of five very different characters, from past, present and future. I hope the audience – irrespective of personal dogma – can contemplate and respect the journey each character takes.”
Each monologue is framed by the use of stylised audio visual elements crafted by media guru Paul Casserly (Eating Media Lunch, Birdland, The Unauthorised History of New Zealand) and sound design by acclaimed musician Paul McLaney (Gramsci, Play On at the Pop-Up Globe). Veteran theatre and television actor/director Oliver Driver worked as dramaturg during the Basement Theatre’s Play Science! script development workshop for this new theatre piece.
What binds the work and the stories isn’t the abortion event itself but the universal experience of loss that each person faces either before or afterwards. And by following women from Victorian England through to the future, this compelling new work inevitably examines how far society has come in treating this subject matter not just socially, but politically and bio-ethically.
The Auckland premiere season of The Voice in My Head runs from Tuesday 24 May to Saturday 4 June, 2016 at The Basement Theatre. The play will then have its international premiere at the prestigious Corpus Playroom at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge, United Kingdom on June 10 and 11.
THE VOICE IN MY HEAD
Basement Theatre, Auckland
Tuesday 24 May to Saturday 4 June, 2016
6.30pm
Tickets: $20 – $25, www.iticket.co.nz
Starring Natalie Medlock
Audio visual elements by Paul Casserly
Theatre , Solo ,
Quietly intense, insightful, commanding respect
Review by Nik Smythe 25th May 2016
There are two reasons that a train compartment is the ideal setting for the purpose of unifying the handful of women portrayed in this entertaining, quietly confronting work.
Firstly, it’s the sort of place where people often feel able to talk intimately with strangers, meeting on neutral territory and opening their hearts to people they’ll like-as-not never see again. Solo performer Natalie Medlock addresses the audience directly throughout each of her five distinct monologues, as though striking up conversation with the commuter sitting opposite.
Secondly, superficial aesthetics aside, your typical passenger train is essentially the same as any other since they first appeared long ago. While Daniel Williams’ estimably-designed set employs a late-twentieth century veneer, it’s sufficiently bland to easily suspend disbelief during scenes set in Victorian England or future California.
Of course, Medlock’s own gift for encapsulating the essential, human truth of pretty much every role I’ve seen her perform over the years is also a crucial component to us buying into the scenario. As is writer/director Jodie Molloy’s astute script wherein five believable characters, culturally worlds apart, are channelled credibly under her direction through the actor, with minimal but effective costume and accessory changes.
The women are unified across time and space by the common circumstance of having their lives profoundly affected by abortion which, wherever you stand in the pro-life/choice debate, can never be a positively driven decision to make. Each specific narrative offers another perspective on the reasons behind such a grave resolve and how it has impacted their own lives and others’.
There’s the well-to-do Victorian lady sent to the country by her mother to ‘put her exhaustions to rest’ and protect the family name; the Kennedy-era Brooklyn housewife determined to break the vicious cycle of broken dreams and disappointments; the European Jew whose work as a doctor during the holocaust included innumerable abortions of conscience.
There’s the contemporary cricket-obsessed Melbourne tomboy who has arguably the most tragic tale to tell. Then, to conclude on an outside-the-box note, the final monologue examines a conceptual future 30 years hence, the narrator being a product of scientific advancements whereby embryos can be fertilised from the stem cells of aborted foetuses, leading to an understandable identity crisis.
As emotionally charged as their respective stories are, the women all notably share a remarkably philosophical insight to the choice they’ve made for variant reasons. One might expect such sombre subject matter to be gruellingly sad yet Medlock’s quietly intense depictions, averaging about 15 minutes apiece, are each infused with a kind of personal dignity and intelligence that commands respect.
AV designer Paul Casserly provides a strong transitional motif in his series of era-specific film clip collages playing in the carriage windows during the quick changes, accompanied by the comforting clatter of a train in motion as per Paul McLaney’s sound design. Ruby Reihana-Wilson’s aptly stark lighting design completes the wholly exemplary production package.
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