Theatre Review: Hush Maidment Theatre

Simon O'Connor quotes word-for-word as he portrays a good neighbour in Hush. Photo / Supplied

Among the moving testimonies of people affected by family violence is the voice of a police officer who speaks with the penetrating clarity born of day-to-day experience as he explains that you can't fix a problem by arresting people and that to fix something you have to understand it.

Hush is a compelling attempt to throw light on the persistent forces that drive family violence. The show presents fragments from an extensive series of interviews with people who have experienced family violence, and analysis from those professionally involved in dealing with the after-effects.

The interviews are voiced word-for-word by a talented and committed group of actors who did the research and created the show.

The stories avoid spectacular Jake Heke-type scenarios and instead build a picture of the quiet desperation lurking beneath the ordinary lives of people who have come to accept often horrific levels of violence as normal because they have never known anything else.

One of the most powerful testimonies is the bewildered voice of a mother who had three normal children but was subjected to a life-threatening regime of violence from a fourth daughter who from an early age displayed a chilling propensity for cruelty and manipulation.

Other stories emphasise the cyclical nature of abuse both in an inter-generational way and in daily experiences - such as that of a child who describes getting beaten up for not polishing his shoes, only to find he is hit again for crying and beaten again for wetting himself.

The stories are presented in an extreme version of verbatim theatre in which actors connected to iPods speak along to recorded interviews and capture all the hesitations and nuanced emotions of the original voices.

Watching live actors precisely reproduce the messy speech patterns of real people is a weirdly disconcerting experience that is quite different from viewing a video recording of an interview.

The effect is something akin to the "alienation" techniques that Brecht employed to disrupt an audience's natural tendency to fall into complete emotional engagement with a performance.

By openly revealing their use of iPod technology, the actors create a distancing effect that encourages cool analysis of the disturbing reality they embody.