THEATRE: THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING BY JOAN DIDION
REVIEW BY AMELIA GROOM
Before Robyn Nevin finished her eight and a half years as Artistic Director of the Sydney Theatre Company, she applied for the rights to The Year of Magical Thinking, a play by Joan Didion.
Under direction from Cate Blanchett, the new STC Co-Artistic Director, Nevin now stars in the one-woman play, and brilliantly evokes the character of Dioion, one of the great American essayists and novelists of recent times.
The play is adapted from Didion’s Pultzir Prize-winning memoir of the same name, which tells the moving story of the year she lost her soul-mate of 40 years, John Dunne, while also enduring the prolonged chronic illness of their only child, Quintana.
A woman who was used to being in control, to fixing problems, to having the last say – Didion found herself unable to change things in any way, and struggled with the feeling of helplessness.
Without a trace of cliché, she recalls the almost unbearable pain she was faced with, and how she came to forego rational, familiar, chronological thought, and turn to ‘magical thinking’ ‘ a private escape that helped her deal with her grief.
‘Magical thinking’ is a term used in anthropology, psychology and cognitive sciences to refer to the delusion that the beliefs of the mind can alter outcomes in the external world. Likened to the thought patterns of children, it is also related to traditional cultures that invested strong beliefs in elaborate rituals and ceremony.
‘Let me make myself clear – of course I knew he was dead,’ Didion says of her late husband, ‘yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that whatever had happened remained open to revision.’
The Year of Magical Thinking recently played to sell-out audiences on Broadway in a production directed by David Hare, featuring Vanessa Redgrave. This production will tour next to Parramatta, Frenchs Forrest, Wollongong, Canberra and Newcastle.
The Year of Magical Thinking
Until May 11
Sydney Theatre Company
Wharf 1, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay
$56-77
Bookings: 9250 1777 or 132 849 or www.sydneytheatre.com.au
