NEVER DID ME ANY HARM
It used to be that, in polite company, you didn’t talk money, politics or sex unless you wanted to make trouble. Now, if you want to get a stranger’s blood up, you talk parenting.
Never Did Me Any Harm is a study in the new taboo: parents hitting children, parents fetishising their children, parents having children and waiting – waiting – for the much-hyped mother-love to kick in.
Against Geoff Cobham’s hyper-suburban backyard, adults become children; loving husbands become figures of fear.
It doesn’t matter that director Kate Champion has no children of her own. Down the pub, the non-parent doesn’t have the right to judge: You don’t get it. You can lecture me once you’ve had one of your own.
And here, on stage, Champion does not judge. Instead she brings together frank interviews with parents, would-be mothers and fathers, children, using the particular brand of physical theatre that production company Force Majeure does so well.
Never Did Me Any Harm is captivating theatre – or documentary, or dance, or whatever you prefer to call it. Taking its cues from Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap, it manages to be challenging and provocative, not incendiary.
Champion and her band of actors and dancers have created a refreshing take on much-travelled territory. One dancer, Sarah Jayne Howard, performs heavily pregnant. She swoops and tumbles across the stage as the voices around her ask: We are bringing, or have brought, another person into the world. What next?
One can’t help but wonder if Howard ever makes it to curtain call without asking herself this same question.
Until Feb 12, Wharf 1 Theatre, 22 Hickson Road, Walsh Bay, $35-79, 9250 1777, sydneytheatre.com.au
