Tim, the 1974 debut novel of Australian writer Colleen McCullough, lives in a long shadow. Any mentions of it tend to be perfunctory, box-checking the transition from neuroscientist to writer that led to McCullough’s second, bestselling novel The Thorn Birds.
The Thorn Birds was adapted into a Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning miniseries in 1983 – though Tim made it to the big screen first, in 1979 (starring Piper Laurie and Mel Gibson). The Thorn Birds was first to be theatricalised, as a 2009 musical, but now Tim is taking the stage and in a new play adaptation currently touring regional New South Wales. But can the story stand up to scrutiny?
The titular Tim is 25-year-old Tim Melville (Ben Goss), who has an intellectual disability that is never named or defined in the book or play. He lives at home with his working-class parents (Andrew McFarlane and Valerie Bader) and sister Dee (Julia Robertson). While working as part of a local gardening crew, he meets Mary (Jeanette Cronin), a wealthy 54-year-old workaholic with a beautiful garden and a busy, lonely life. Slowly, their unexpected friendship transforms into love.
Adapted here by Tim McGarry (who also wrote the stage version of Trent Dalton’s novel Boy Swallows Universe) in a production directed by Darren Yap, the story is like an old pair of slippers: a little worn out but still warm. The play is not set in the 1970s – there are mobile phones, dating apps and Google – and there has been a generous attempt to update the story’s more outdated qualities, with varying results.
In the novel, Mary was a secretary for a mining executive; in the play, she is the executive (a promotion that still feels in line with the second-wave feminist agency of the novel – Mary can have it all, even the power to harm the planet). The play, thankfully, cuts down on the bullying Tim receives at work and refocuses the story away from trauma and towards positivity.
McGarry has decades of experience as a disability support worker and has taken great care to explore the ways Australia’s support systems for people with disabilities are often insufficient. When a tragic event in the Melville home prompts Tim’s father to start planning for his son’s future care, the options are bleak and broken down for us in a clear-eyed, fatalistic manner by Raj (Akkshey Caplash), a “team leader” for a group home brought in to advise on Tim’s prospects. This is where the play is at its strongest and Yap’s light, naturalistic approach thrives in moments like it.
Unfortunately, where the play hasn’t evolved enough is in its approach to Tim. It really wants us to be sure that Tim and Mary are both capable and deserving of romance, and that Tim deserves to have agency and a voice in his own life – characters frequently state this – but he is rarely given the opportunity for either. His father decides to change Tim’s living arrangements without asking his son first; Tim is not involved in the frequent discussions about his future.
There is an opportunity with playmaking, especially when adapting a different textual form, to find new ways into a narrative. You can shift perspective, voice and character with a few lighting cues, a directorial choice or in the script. It is frustrating that, in a play about a romance between a disabled man and an able-bodied woman, the disabled character is so passive, narratively speaking. We’re denied the glimpses of Tim’s inner life that we receive for Mary, his parents and Dee. He is vaguely defined – a lack of specificity, especially in disability narratives, can lead to audiences filling in the blanks with harmful stereotypes. There are also some old disability tropes, like the “magical” healing of love: Mary is able to teach Tim to read, when his parents believed he never would.
Goss, an actor with cerebral palsy (he has stressed that his and Tim’s disabilities are quite different) delivers a grounded, generous performance, bringing a crucial warmth and consistency that helps fill in some of the gaps. Max Lambert’s soundscapes are designed to show us Tim’s view of the world, with confusing, overlapping dialogue, droning sounds and tense musical stings rising up to show us Tim’s struggle with sensory overload, before easing into relief. This helps, but it’s never quite enough.
The play is a feelgood one, especially as a story of Mary’s late-in-life discovery of her own potential to be loved and wanted. It is also well-intentioned on disability rights. But do we need a nearly 50-year-old story to explore this? Watching Tim is pleasant enough, but it feels like 90 minutes of missed opportunities.
Tim is touring New South Wales until 2 September; see here for all the dates.
