This is big, bold, beautiful storytelling. And that it’s new Australian work is utterly exhilarating. Thank you Snatched Collective, White Box and KXT.
Mercury Poisoning by Madeleine Stedman is set in the early 1960’s and focuses on the space race between the USA and the USSR. It bounces intoxicatingly between three separate plotlines: the female cosmonaut program in Russia; the female astronaut program in America; and also in America, an African-American actor working on a TV series that is set (you guessed it) in space.
These plots don’t connect, except thematically, and that makes for an enormously rich dramatic experience.
It’s a colossal project and director Kim Hardwick presents it brilliantly. On a fundamentally empty stage, scenes and settings flow smoothly and quickly, one into another, positioning us to delight in discovering the many connections.
I say an empty stage, but that’s not quite accurate. In Meg Anderson’s design, above floats a sky of blue fabric, as thin as silk, ethereal, dreamlike, evoking the mystery, the danger, of space.
Hardwick’s use of movement to suggest space flight is a visual treat.
Costumes by Anderson are also wonderful, successfully transporting us to the multiple worlds of the play.
And an extra joy of a piece like this, part of its thrilling theatricality, is as actors double, they switch accents, a feat the performers navigate splendidly, thanks to accent and dialect coach Linda Nicholls-Gidley.
The entire ensemble is superb. I’ll describe some, but not all, of the magic.
Violette Ayad excels as Valeria the cosmonaut, achieving an absolutely mesmerising balance between vulnerability and courage.
Her counterpoint in the States, Molly, is played by Teodora Matović and her portrayal of determination and confidence is inspiring.
Shawnee Jones as a black actor in a white industry is magnificent, offering a portrait that perfectly blends exuberance and anger, and informs both with a searing intelligence.
Playing a musician, Tinashe Mangwana glows with an almost childlike vitality, and this is beautifully counterpointed with his later turn as sombre House Committee chairperson.
Jack Richardson as cosmonaut Yuri and as the lead actor in what feels like a Star Trek parody is terrific, finding in both roles the discomforting complexity within those we glibly label heroes.
Similarly, Shaw Cameron as the idolised astronaut John Glenn powerfully depicts the patriarchal menace lurking behind male charisma. When compared to his Russian cosmonaut and lover, it’s an especially fine polyphonous performance.
Brendan Miles skilfully presents authority figures in all three worlds of the play, effectively suggesting the multifarious ways power is exercised.
As a senator’s wife and would be astronaut, Sarah Jane Starr flawlessly captures class, privilege and that disarming charm of the American creed of positivity.
Melissa Jones stuns with a portrait of a famous American pilot who threatens to kick the ladder away from the women who seek to follow and transcend her.
Back to the script. On its most obvious level, we’re presented inspiring stories of marginalised people seeking equality. But what makes Stedman’s play extraordinary is the depth of the treatment of what has become so often in our theatre a narrative cliché.
I’ll explore this depth in terms of the choice of setting. By juxtaposing women seeking equality in different societies, we’re invited to see both the universality of the phenomena and the multiple ways it’s manifest. There’s a refreshing brashness to the American women, an energetic individualism, but this comes into collision with the House Committee’s simple question Does our society need you in space? In Soviet Russia, individualism is discouraged, and the women must speak perpetually, and perhaps sometimes genuinely, of serving the state.
Further contrasts are developed, digging deeper into the relationship of the individual with the community. The Russians posit We must follow the rules so the next generation can break them. The Americans ask Can you be it, if you don’t see it?
It’s all powerfully suggestive of the tension at the heart of modern Life: we feel we personally deserve equality, but the granting of that equality is at the whim of others.
And that’s where the time period in which this play is set is so provocative. The 1960’s were different. Think the speeches of Kennedy and of Luther King. Sixty years on, the zeitgeist has changed. The 1960’s dreamt of equality. We demand it. They said We could make this happen. We say Why hasn’t it happened yet? Our attitude is completely understandable, but I suspect much can be learnt from theirs. If your equality is at the whim of others, then you have to get the others onboard. Inviting them to share a dream might do this more effectively than telling them they are evil. Visions unite, guilt divides.
But, you could respond, it didn’t work in the 60’s.
Perhaps. But to appropriate Chesterton, the hippy ideal was not tried and found wanting; it was found difficult, and left untried.
Can it be tried now? Obama, in his campaigns, peddled hope with success.
I’m not suggesting Stedman’s play necessarily asserts all this, but through her radical choice of setting, the debate on strategy – how we are to make a better world – is gloriously refreshed.
Similarly, by her juxtaposition of a TV series set in space with the actual space race, the issue of the pursuit of equality is given true range. Equality might be spoken of from the mountain top, but it only has meaning when it comes to the people of the plain. In a brilliant final scene, performed by Mangwana and Jones, they argue the value of her silly TV job, and we’re asked to consider whether you need to go to the moon to change the world.
This is a fantastic production of a tremendous play, and one of the most stimulating pieces of theatre I’ve seen for a long while.
Paul Gilchrist
Mercury Poisoning by Madeleine Stedman
At KXT on Broadway until 30 March
www.kingsxtheatre.com/mercury-poisoning
Image by Clare Hawley
Theatre Red 