In the lead-up to A Good Death, I was excited for a show about death. It’s a topic we don’t talk about enough, and whose taboo status doesn’t serve anyone in the lead-up to experiencing it. So naturally, seeing a show about it is an ideal way to expose yourself to the concept and open your mind to make you think about it differently. Right? I don’t like being the bearer of bad news, but the narrator of my mind informs me I was, in fact, wrong.
In a pink and white drenched room, the viewer is taken through the journey of a dying woman, played by Kim Parkhill, from her terminal diagnosis to the termination. Exploring themes of assisted dying and bodily autonomy should make for interesting discourse around death. But I just couldn’t get over the fact that it was a play full of women, by a feminist theatre group, about the emotional labour of supporting someone during difficult times in a largely domestic setting. With the light pink details all throughout the set, it just felt overly feminine and fluffy, like it was trying to make light of a heavy topic. This can be a refreshing way to present death, but I just found it to be drenched in hyper-femme elements that feel out of place in a time of increasing awareness of gender stereotypes. That’s not to say it felt traditional or unrepresentative of contemporary women’s experiences. These stereotypes persist in many contexts, sadly. Did I maybe miss the note about this show being satirical? Or maybe the content didn’t resonate with me because I’m not a woman.
A Good Death. Photography by Amanda Watson.
There was one area in which dated perceptions thrived, and that was in the characterisation of the mother, played by Irene Jarzabek. She nailed the role of an out-of-touch mother who just wants the best for her child through the lens of her own experience, trying to ignore when that lens filters out critical elements of their child’s identity and tries to erase them. The delicately irritable exchanges between mother and daughter were flawlessly delivered as they argued throughout about religion and family values. There’s something I can’t quite explain about what it feels like to try and unpack the irony of people who cite religion as the moral compass whilst ignoring the damage it has done on queer communities. They might accept your sexuality, and you know they mean well, but it still doesn’t come across how they intended it to. Parkhill played those scenes viscerally with such subtlety that it might have been missed by those who can’t relate to such experiences.
Aside from those raw moments, I didn’t know if I liked or related to Parkhill’s character, the Woman. Regardless of how I felt about the character, it was played by an actor who had the poise and movement of a classically trained actor; she had a strong stage presence. The monologues felt a little indulgent, but I liked the way the monologues broke the fourth wall. Instead of acknowledging the audience as consumers of the story, we were immersed in the story, as if we were part of it too. The dialogue intended to be poetic and throwing in choose-your-own-adventure-style storytelling fell flat.
A Good Death. Photography by Amanda Watson.
The pacing was overall slow and felt a little inconsistent. The Woman delivered monologues jumping back and forth between the present on her deathbed and the past few months as she recalls key moments where her mother, lover, best friend, and doctor deal with this news. Bringing in the doctor’s perspective was an interesting take, as having a much further connection to the main character than the other characters made the world contained within that small stage feel a little bit bigger, and less cramped. The slow pacing was clearly an attempt to elicit the drawn-out nature of death. Maybe it’s accurate, but I wouldn’t know as I’m not dead.
Katarina Johnston executed excellent lighting. I always admire the skill involved with a gentle fade to give the audience time to digest the happenings in front of them. Lighting has the ability to give the entire show composure in a way that the other elements on stage can’t. In the final scene, Johnston adopted beautiful symbolism as Woman stood under a white light looking at her loved ones just out of reach while they were sitting on a bed nearby looking towards where her physical form was laying. It’s a common trope for the dead to be looking onto their deathbed from the outside, adopted by many good writers. But it was the lighting in this moment that really drove it home for me.
A Good Death. Photography by Amanda Watson.
The thing about death is that the rituals around it are for the living. Eulogies are usually written by other people, and even if you don’t have specific requests others will probably plan a funeral when you die. The dead will always be spoken for by the living. So, what’s to say this wasn’t a relatable first-person perspective of dying? No one in the audience had certainly done it before. It’s not a topic a lot of people like to talk about and is often predominately done so in a sorrowful way. I appreciate anyone who is willing to write about it and encourage exploration of death before circumstance forces us to.
A Good Death is presented by Tempest Theatre and is on at Subiaco Arts Centre from 16-20 July.