The closest call came at Kings Beach, Byron Bay.
There for a friend’s 40th birthday, I had been caught up in a treacherous rip. Fighting for my life, precisely as you’re not supposed to do, I was spent. Muscles aching and lungs full of salt water, I quietly surrendered. In that strange calm, my only concern was for my poor mother’s embarrassment at my bloated body washing up on a gay nudist beach.
Miraculously, that brave friend crashed through the surf and somehow saved me, half-conscious and spluttering my guts up, delirious on the sand. There have been other close shaves and false alarm scares, but that’s the one that almost crossed the line.
Why am I starting this review of multi-hyphenate gadabouttown Benjamin Law’s stage adaptation of the late Cory Taylor’s Dying: A Memoir by prattling on about silly old me?
Because death comes for us all. Like it or not, it’s the one thing we have in common. Some of us are born dead or otherwise check out early. Others waste away mentally long before our bodies give up the ghost. Yet more carry on until the physical betrays us. But many, if not most, Westerners barely talk about it. Even the doctors treating us in our final years are hesitant to name the beast.
Taylor refused this silence. Frustrated by the paucity of conversation around how best to die well, and the hurdles erected around deciding precisely when and where, Taylor prepared herself in earnest. Literally writing the book about it, Dying: A Memoir, it’s both an act of ferocious resistance and serene acceptance.
Dying in conversation
Comedian and actor Genevieve Morris ably shifts between herself, Taylor and a host of others in this one-woman play reanimating Taylor’s thoughts.
It’s one thing to pen your personal approach to dying and quite another to translate someone else’s after their death. But that’s what Law – a friend of Taylor’s who viewed her trials from the outside, however close – has valiantly tackled.
Having re-read Taylor’s marvellous memoir recently, I recognised great swathes of her words in Law’s play. But the eddies and flows run wild, pooling in unexpected places, racing through others and doubling back.
Morris, with the abundant good humour of her line of work, makes full use of the Arts Centre’s intimate Fairfax Theatre. Even before the lights can dim she interrupts the hubbub from on high in the auditorium. She wants us to turn off, not just silence, our phones, though she will pause for a selfie with one enthusiastic audience member first.
Yes, this is a play about a too-young mother of two teenagers receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. There will be tears, Morris warns, but there will also be what might feel like inappropriate laughter, too. And that’s ok. It’s as Taylor would have wanted it.
What she didn’t want was the clinical brusqueness of the diagnosing doc who, rather than name the reaper, instead opted for ‘adjustment disorder’ to foist Taylor’s feelings onto a too chipper psychologist pushing her onto whale song and mindfulness apps.
An atheist, Taylor was sure she would return to nothingness. Morris again breaks the fourth wall to ask several audience members what they think is coming next and if they are afraid of its approach. These beats, folded into Law’s thrumming script and director Jean Tong’s pared-back staging, remind us that death is a conversation. One that involves our loved ones and many overlapping opinions.
Dying: A Memoir: strongest when simplest
For all these warmly shared interludes, Dying: A Memoir is at its strongest when simplest.
Taylor’s Japanese partner, Shin, is an artist who works on broken fragments of ceramics. He mused to Taylor that these reclaimed canvases – some centuries old and fished from the river in Arit, where they split their time, alternating with Brisbane – were one way to eternity. Likewise, Taylor’s words persist beyond her body, refixed by Law and Tong as if kintsugi.
Set and costume designer James Lew picks up these shards and fashions them into an oblong aeroplane window that’s awash with the blue and white lines of ceramic art. When Taylor recalls clinging to her mother during a tropical storm, those white and blue rivulets also become lightning, or cracks in the wall, or the slowly firing neurons of a dying brain.
Backlit by lighting designer Rachel Lee alongside strobing, they are quietly overwhelming. Little details add up. Morris and the occasional stagehand constantly shift a cluster of red seats on stage. They look for all the world like those of the Fairfax set free, as if they’ve escaped from underneath us.
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In Tong’s deft hands, Dying: A Memoir flourishes in this free-flowing form. If one scene, depicting Taylor’s dying stardom in high demand at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, feelsa little indulgent of Law, a regular host there, it’s a minor quibble. It’s also a scene highlighting the pompousness of ‘allies’ who will talk over – and for – those in the know.
Darius Kedros’ subtle score and ambient sound design, which includes ghostly echoes of school runs, storms, and sirens, whisk us back and forth through time at a measured but brisk pace. A wall-mounted digital clock is an altitude cracker, waiting room number, year marker and inevitably ticking clock.
I’m glad mine still has time left in its flickering gaze. That I lived to see the day of this loving tribute to a death lived well.
Dying: A Memoir is at the Fairfax Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne, until 29 November. Find out more.
