All My Love

Henry Lawson and Mary Gilmore’s life-long love was an epic tragedy of desires thwarted by social expectation and circumstance. Writer Anne Brooksbank came across this beautiful story while researching Gilmore’s memoirs and has done a creditable job reproducing these characters on stage.

We meet Mary (Kim Denman) as a prim young woman with feminist and socialist leanings. As she matures through the play, she shows herself to be pragmatic, intelligent and strong minded, giving birth in Patagonia under awful circumstances and living alone in Sydney at the turn of the century.

Dion Mills’ performance as Henry Lawson is superlative. He captures the man who as awkward youth doesn’t quite fit his body, his clothes, or the social norms of the time, as he perches nervously on the edge of a couch holding a cup of tea, all angles like a praying mantis. He’s heard of manners and while he’s happy to conform he doesn’t understand the need.

This unvarnished teenager has a wordmanship that shines, in spite of his inability to spell or punctuate. Later as he falls into alcoholism (one suspects to cover over his social difficulties) he is more relaxed in his surroundings, but still palpably an outsider. The story is told from Gilmore’s point-of-view and thus glosses over Lawson’s many affairs.

My feel is that while the production was very good, there might be room for further development. The pace flags just a little at the beginning. Archival material such as letters blends seamlessly with the poetry and Brookbank’s dialogue, accurately capturing the cadences of the era. However, perhaps the character of Mary doesn’t quite convey the passion contained in Gilmore’s poetry, although perhaps this is to draw a deliberate contrast to wild boy Harry? In real life, she was the stronger character of the two, and I felt it would have been good to show more struggle between her passion and pragmatism. I felt that the music could have been more varied, and perhaps some of the images in the projection less blatant. While the backlit bars of the jail window worked beautifully, the static image of pyramids while the pair was in Egypt was unsubtle.

Anyone with an interest a good, literary love story will enjoy hearing these authentic voices from the past.

Cathy Bannister