I recently saw The Spare Room at Belvoir St Theatre – adapted and directed by Eamon Flack from Helen Garner’s acclaimed 2008 novel. The story centres on Garner’s experience nursing a friend with terminal cancer in the last months of her life. Judy Davis is, of course, brilliant – sharp-edged, wry, angry and tender. Her acting is so physical – in the Charlie Chaplain/Buster Keaton mode. And being so close to the actors – the production is staged theatre-in-the-round – made it even more powerful.
Read: Theatre review: The Spare Room, Belvoir St Theatre
It was a very good play. Genuinely entertaining. A tight two hours with no interval, and I wasn’t bored for a second. I love the book, and I loved Flack and Davis’ interpretation of it. In particular I appreciated the humour and empathy that the supporting cast brought to the stage – the parade of doctors and nurses, friends and family played by Emma Diaz, Alan Dukes and Hannah Waterman.
But afterwards, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was missing.
Interestingly, ArtsHub‘s four-star review aside, the newspaper and online magazine reviews were average too. They named particular annoyances with cast, dialogue and scenes – which curiously had all been altered, changed or deleted by the time I saw the play. Clearly, Flack cares what the reviewers say – and did his best to shine the production up to a perfect polish even once the season had opened.
It took me a few days, then, to pinpoint the issue. And that is – that Flack has staged a novel. In staying true to Garner’s original work and working so hard to connect with and entertain his audience – he became misaligned on his most vital mission: to stage a play.
The Spare Room: finding the real complication
The domain of the novel is a character’s inner conflict. Yes, theatre can do this too. But prose does it best. What a play can achieve far and away better than a novel is interpersonal conflict – between two or more people. That’s because a play is almost all dialogue, supported by non-verbal communication. Prose is words – and whether in the third person or first person – it allows us to get inside a person’s head arguably better than any other art form.
In the novel The Spare Room, we learn everything about Helen’s private angst – her anger at Nicola’s gullible acceptance of alternative treatments, Nicola’s stubbornness, Helen’s guilt for feeling that anger, her exhaustion, her sudden stabs of love. The Spare Room is a masterclass in novel-writing – mainly because it stays so true to one woman’s inner conflict. Garner, as she always does, says all the raw, uncomfortable things we think but rarely say out loud.
On stage though, we needed to see the tension between Helen and Nicola. We get hints of it – moments when the denial, hope, desperation and love collide – but, really, it’s Helen’s show. She works through her angst with the minor characters, and with us, the audience.
Part of the problem was in the writing and adaptation. Part of it was in the casting: Elizabeth Alexander as Nicola opposite Judy Davis as Helen just wasn’t strong enough. Ultimately, though, it came down to the framing. In trying to create an entertaining play – which they did – they forgot to lean all the way, singularly, at the expense of all else, into the tension between those two women. Do that – and there’s no need to try to keep the audience engaged. They’ll be clinging to the edge of their seats.
The Spare Room: what storytellers can learn
The experience reminded me of one of the laws of storytelling: a master storyteller knows where the real complication lies and she puts her pen or her lens directly over it.
In a novel, the complication can sit inside a single mind. On stage, it has to spark between people. And if you adapt a story from one form to another, you have to know how to shift that tension with it.
The lesson? If you want your story to land – on the page, on the stage or anywhere else – don’t look away from the real complication. That’s where your story lives.
