Queensland-based author Cory Taylor published her memoir about the dying process as she was living it in 2016 – the same year American neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi published his memoir about the dying process as he was living it, When Breath Becomes Air. Both books are invaluable from a clinical standpoint but they also seem strangely detached, emotionally and psychologically muted. The creeping horror of death is largely absent. Neither book seems remotely suited to the theatre.
It’s a curious choice for Benjamin Law to adapt into a play and curious again for Melbourne Theatre Company to stage it. According to the program, Law was a personal friend of Taylor’s and felt compelled to translate it into theatre “with a sense of responsibility to my late friend’s legacy”. It’s a germane word, as Taylor’s book – and to a lesser extent the play that emerges from it – largely constitutes her legacy, at least publicly. It may have been foremost in her mind as she wrote.
Taylor was diagnosed with stage four melanoma in 2005 and kept it a secret from everyone but her husband, Shin – including her children, “trying, I suppose, to protect them from pain, because that was my job as their mother”. It’s one of those little threads in the memoir that needs pulling, a sliver of insight that a theatrical adaptation might explore and exploit, but Law does nothing with it. Taylor’s complicated relationship with her father, one of the book’s more intriguing discursions, is jettisoned entirely.
Dying: A Memoir is dominated by Genevieve Morris, who plays Taylor (along with her doctor, therapist, mother, brother and anyone else the story happens to conjure) as a flinty, jocular, compassionate, refreshingly candid terminal cancer patient guiding the audience through a process none of us can avoid but rarely discuss. She’s utterly ordinary but her need to stare her circumstances directly in the face gives her an aura of indestructibility (cruel, given we know her fate).
Morris’s performance is warm and expansive. Her character changes are swift and clearly demarcated, the actor employing accents and vocal ticks to suggest personalities brittle, laconic, smug and confused. This gives the play colour and texture but it tends to reduce everyone who isn’t Taylor to one-dimensional figures with no inner life. Medical professionals are either officious or clueless and the profound ambivalences around Taylor’s family – something she touches on in her memoir – are here flattened into banality.
Director Jean Tong does an admirable job shaping the material, even if they can’t quite get it humming. Moods shift and mutate subtly, and the grim certitude of death stalks the stage like a theatre ghost, but there is very little actual drama here and almost no contest of ideas. James Lew’s set – a small collection of cushioned seats that can be arranged into various configurations – makes thematic sense as a waiting room for death but is visually dull and practically limited. Rachel Lee’s lighting design is dynamic, however, evoking monsoonal Fiji as effortlessly as a soulless nursing home.
Law does attempt to theatricalise the source material; he creates scenes and conjures character. Some work beautifully: the scene of Taylor attempting to write a suicide note to her children is heart-rending for its restraint. Others are far less successful. The doctor who gives Taylor her prognosis is cartoonish in his professional dereliction and disdain, and the therapist is a stupid stereotype. Law has a tendency to lazy caricature that his (often very funny) quips can’t hide.
Crucially, his additions fail to solve a central dilemma, one Taylor herself admits: “I’ve put off using my death as material … because I couldn’t find the right tone. I’m not even sure I’ve found it now.” Dying: A Memoir is a fractured and impressionistic book, sometimes blunt and sometimes achingly poetic. It takes a skilled playwright to fashion it into the stuff of drama. Law throws a lot at the task – breaking the fourth wall, utilising sound and projection – but he never lands on a unifying tonal register. This is part memoir, part eulogy, part Ted Talk – but it isn’t, at this stage, a cohesive and satisfying play.
