Survival

Nadia (Tatiana Kotsimbos) lies unconscious in a hospital bed.  They pumped her out, but she took all the pills she had – anti-depressants and whatever else - and her life hangs in the balance.  Her mother Alison (Lainie Hart) is adamant it was an accident, that Nadia was just trying to calm herself down.  Nadia’s other – and biological – mother Heidi (Wendy Bos) doesn’t believe it.  Heidi, it turns out, is only there by chance.  She’s an aid worker in Kenya with an NGO, back in Melbourne for a conference.  That her presence is a coincidence infuriates Alison and the two of them, once partners, pick up on all the old arguments that drove them apart, exacerbated now by Heidi’s having left their depressed daughter in Alison’s care. 

Why did Nadia do this?  Our sense of her is eerily created by reading out her social media posts on her phone: a mix of the flippant and self-absorbed.  Maybe her boyfriend, Scott (John Marc Desengano) can explain?  But when he finally, reluctantly, arrives at the bedside, it turns out he and Nadia broke up weeks ago.  Was that the reason?  Well, he doesn’t think so.  He’s a stolid fellow and – seemingly – not too fussed or surprised at his ex-girlfriend’s suicide attempt – and he’s more interested – or distracted – by all the fun things on his phone…

Director Marissa Bennett sets herself a hard task.  There’s a hospital bed on a bare stage, minimal lighting changes by Georgie Wolfe and some atmospheric sound by Thomas Crawford…  and that’s it.  But Ms Bennett’s actors, so well-cast, compel our attention.  Of course, throughout there is tension as we wonder whether or not Nadia will regain consciousness and relieve her two mothers’ guilt. 

As Nadia, Ms Kotsimbos brings a kind of addled, solipsistic sweetness to the role and it’s extremely sad.  Lainie Hart gives a fearless performance as Alison, the woman left behind: bitter, brittle, resentful and irrational.  When she makes a blatantly manipulative confession toward the end, we can see why Heidi escaped to Africa, abandoning Nadia, selfish and uncaring though it might have been. 

Wendy Bos, on the other hand, has a persona that suggests a self-contained strength and a cool rationality.  But her Heidi is evasive, and the character’s self-protective, self-justifying ploy is to care for worse-off others – much worse off than her first world daughter – in a far-off land.  Scott, the boyfriend, becomes a disturbing figure as played by Mr Desengano: his character’s complacent indifference suggests a determination not to care: that’s his strategy. 

The achievement of the writing, direction and performance of Survival (whether or not this is the playwright’s intention) is to dramatize that we are all on a psychological spectrum – all aberrant to a greater or lesser degree in our quest for survival and – ironically – our attempts to stay ‘sane’.  The original element here is the influence of popular culture and social media, which can so easily become more real than our reality.  Celebrity fairy tales and movies that present a simple world of solutions and happy resolutions and it’s risky for Ms Richards to rely on the audience’s knowledge of Bindi Erwin and the now quite old movie Grease (1978) to make some of her most telling points, but it works within the play.  Overall, she has a very good ear for natural dialogue that’s loaded with subtext. 

Survival is a good piece – as far as it goes.  The question might be, does it go far enough?  At less than an hour, it is a snapshot of a situation in which a suicide attempt becomes a catalyst for revealing the inadequate ways the characters deal with it.  In her program note, Ms Richards speaks of her trepidation in writing about mental illness, but more likely, writing about her friends and family.  But has there been a writer who didn’t?  And her play is coolly, even ruthlessly, observed and all the better for that.  It may be a ‘chamber piece’, but it is a truthful and poignant one.

Michael Brindley  

Image: Tessa Mansfield-Hung