Director’s Note
My mum has bipolar. But this show isn’t about her or me directly. Maybe the show is like a letter from me to her. Or a letter from old me to young me and my sisters. Or a letter from me to my mum through Mark. Or from me to a young kid who is going through what we went through. But none of us are represented in it. We are represented through it, through a young person trying to grapple with big ideas. It’s a very messy thing to talk about. A parent being mentally unwell. I still struggle with it. But I have always thought that young people seem to be able to deal with these ideas as well as adults, and sometimes even better. A young person’s capacity for empathy and care always astounds me. Mark came to me a few years ago with an idea. What if we did a show with just a kid on stage. Trust them with a whole show. Give them all the support re:group can offer, but let them do the whole thing. An hour-long monologue by a single child on stage. I was sold. I think that trust is the principal focus of our process of making POV . Trusting that the young person can do this, trusting they can learn their lines, trusting them to deal with the emotional weight of the show and trusting them to artfully boss two new adult actors around each night. Through this work, I hope we have found a way for there to be a real conversation between a child and an adult onstage. It couldn’t all be scripted. We had to leave it open for a real moment to happen in the theatre. That’s our take on the idea of a documentary.
Writer’s Note
Onstage tonight you will see two adults talking with a child about mental health. The adults will be unprepared and unrehearsed. The child will guide them through the experience, in charge and in control. How often is it like this? How often do children have the space and agency to be in charge on these topics? To run things, set the scene, call the shots? In our show, Bub is a documentary filmmaker, making a documentary about her family. But it’s about our families too. There is no family, no person, unaffected by the complex, intersecting issues of mental health and wellbeing. In making the show, our challenge was to talk about this difficult topic in a way that was safe for a young person, that adhered to Live Performance Australia’s Guidelines for Child Safety and that two adult actors could make their way through without rehearsal. We’ve made the show this way because in real life we are rarely prepared. These conversations are always fraught, makeshift and done under pressure. We didn’t want to write ABOUT these conversations, we wanted to HAVE these conversations.
We hope the show encourages more of them.
Mark Rogers
Solomon Thomas
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