Patricia Cornelius is a playwright drawn to society’s marginalia – the abject, the criminal, the poor and downtrodden. As a result, her work has existed largely on the fringes of the mainstream; she is primarily regarded as an outsider artist, perhaps even as Australian theatre’s preeminent dissident. How, then, do we square this with My Sister Jill, a main-stage production for Melbourne Theatre Company that flirts with the “dun-coloured realism” of a novelist like George Johnston?
It’s not her first time on a space like this. She adapted Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba for MTC back in 2018, transplanting the seething emotional turmoil of an Andalusian family to Western Australia. My Sister Jill is her adaptation of her own 2002 semi-autobiographical novel, and while it contains signature stylistic quirks – namely the staccato sentences and choral layering, the uncanny use of vernacular and slang – it feels worlds away from the kind of gut-punch agitprop of earlier works such as Runt or Shit.
We’re in a post-second world war suburban landscape, presided over by patriarch Jack (Ian Bliss), a man so damaged by his experiences in the war, he can’t find a way to relate to his children that doesn’t spark rage and resentment. Wife Martha (Maude Davey) urges kindness from the kids even while excusing her husband’s abusive tendencies. Son Johnnie (James O’Connell) is the most persecuted of the lot, moving through the world of his father’s wrath under a cloud of general bewilderment. The twins Door (Benjamin Nichol) and Mouse (Zachary Pidd) at least have each other. Eldest daughter Jill (Lucy Goleby) is the most resistant to her dad’s moods, the only member of the family who’ll defy him. The youngest, Christine (Angourie Rice), is enamoured of Jack, obsessed with his war stories, entranced by his almost apocryphal heroics.
As the years go by and the kids grow up – some reluctantly, some as fast as they possibly can – the spectre of a new crisis hovers over the family, of Vietnam and conscription. It seems whatever they do, they can’t escape the damage and destruction of war. Cornelius wants us to see those years as a continuous battle that lingered long after the shelling was over. Also as a battlefield of ideas, a war of generations and belief systems. It’s a lot of ground to cover, and it’s only intermittently successful.
Part of the problem is that Cornelius’s talents as a stylist seem a poor fit for the subject matter. Her dialogue is expressionistic, her characters verging on the vaudevillian. This is terrific for blistering mood pieces such as Savages – where four men cajole each other into acts of barbarity like a chorus of cruelty – but it doesn’t suit a story that cries out for social realism, for the kind of accumulated detail that could fill out this family’s fraught dynamics. Characters in My Sister Jill tend to hit a certain register early and maintain it throughout in increasingly shrill ululations.
This is most pronounced in the character of Jack, who is depicted as little more than a callous, bludgeoning bully. He rages and torments, seethes and sulks, but he rarely seems to suffer in a way that might make us care. Bliss is serviceable in the role, but the character tends to suck the oxygen from the room. Given that he dominates the action, this is dramatically crippling. Rice also suffers from a static emotional register and their scenes together, recalling Jack’s war exploits, are particularly grating and repetitive.
Director Susie Dee, who has steered so many of Cornelius’s plays to success, is a master of group movement and tonal control, but she struggles to make it work here. The production has a lot of physical dynamism – characters creep and pounce, leap and cower, mimic and gesture – but where this had served to explicate Cornelius’s rough music in previous productions, here it feels like padding, like compensation for a lack.
Precisely what is lacking is hard to articulate. Performances are solid, with flashes of brilliance. Davey is excellent as the stoic mum, and Goleby brings variation and grit to Jill. O’Connell is most effective when revealing aspects of his nature kept hidden from his dad’s tyranny, and Nichol and Pidd are touching when they get the chance to push beyond the cartoonish. Marg Horwell’s set and costumes niftily evoke the period, even if the striking FJ Holden on the side of the stage is criminally underused. Rachel Burke’s lighting is excellent, clarifying transitions and driving the pace, and Kelly Ryall’s sound composition is moody and unsettling.
But for a play drawn so purposely from lived experience, My Sister Jill never rises above the schematic. Australia’s changing attitude to war – that shift from the hagiography of the “digger” to the broiling resentments of Vietnam – is interesting from a sociological perspective, but Cornelius fails to add new insight. Straddled uneasily between the epic social realism of Dorothy Hewett’s This Old Man Comes Rolling Home and the satirical absurdities of Patrick White’s A Cheery Soul, My Sister Jill feels like a minor work of family drama, underwhelming and unremarkable.
• My Sister Jill is on at The Sumner, Southbank theatre, Melbourne until 28 October
