Mother

Mother shows us the face of homelessness the way we’ve never seen it, the way we’ve always seen it.

The face belongs to Noni Hazlehurst, endearing icon of the Australian entertainment industry, but we’ve never seen it quite like this.

It is haunted. There is confusion, longing and loathing. A loss of self.

Hazlehurst is known to many as the face of Play School, an advocate for children, the host of Better Homes and Gardens, and star of A Place to Call Home. But on the Cremorne Theatre stage she casts all this aside to be Christie, a woman tormented by the hand life has dealt her, not coping with motherhood, leaning on relationships that fail, living in a home she is forced to abandon, nursing a child who can give her no warmth.

Her feet are black, clothes torn, leaves litter the stage and underscore every scene while the sound of birds, scavenging together for scraps or singing a forlorn lament, provide the soundtrack for a ruined life.

In a script that took Daniel Keene the sum of his years plus 10 days to write, Mother exposes a set of indiscriminate circumstances which conspire to turn a new mother into a homeless nobody where a storm rages in a mind not yet prepared to admit madness.

We all know there are homeless people. Some throw money at them, few rarely engage, or dare to conceive that their lives might share more in common.

Director Matt Scholten challenges our position, drawing us close to the helplessness of the homeless, trusting that the empathy we have for Hazlehurst will blur the boundary between privilege and poverty.

It does. This is Hazlehurst’s Brisbane mainstage theatrical debut, and for almost 80 minutes we are spellbound.

The bitter sweet reward for delivering the performance of a lifetime in Mother is that Hazlehurst inherits a burden of responsibility that bleeds through the character into the actor. She doesn’t magically become herself after the show, bowing to the standing ovation and indulging us with her radiant smile which generations have come to love. She can’t. She has been changed. And the challenge for us is to look into her eyes and share that burden by acknowledging that we all have something to live for, even if we have nothing to live with.

Debra Bela

Photographer: Brett Boardman