The Shadow Box

OUT OF THE SHADOWS: Cast as Mark, who is key to his terminally ill lover Brian’s emotional balance, James Packman and Iscah Montgomerie, who plays Brian’s ex enjoy a moment during rehearsals for Unity Theatre’s production of The Shadow Box. Picture by Elenor Gill

We forget there was a time when terminal illness was not talked about. Cancer for instance was known as the c-word and only mentioned in hushed tones.

Around the time playwright Michael Cristofer scripted The Shadow Box in the mid-1970s, though, hospice care was becoming less stigmatised. In the late 1950s, Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was appalled by hospital treatment of dying patients. Kubler-Ross’s lectures forced medical students to face people with terminal illness and by the mid-1960s she had developed seminars that used interviews with terminal patients.

This was the evolving cultural shift in which Cristofer penned The Shadow Box, a ground-breaking work and one that resonates now, says Elizabeth Boyce, director of Unity Theatre’s production of the play.

Boyce has little time for the bleak 1980 movie version of The Shadow Box. Unlike the grim weepies that manipulated movie-going audience’s emotions in 1970s movies, the play has warmth, poignancy and humour. The Shadow Box centres on three people who are dealing with terminal illness. It focuses on their lives rather than their deaths, says Boyce.

“It’s about their families, their relationships and how everyone deals with the situation.”

As part of a psychological scheme, three patients who have reached the end of their treatment have agreed to live within the hospital grounds and have interviews with a psychiatrist.

Cristofer uses the device of an interviewer, played by Arran Dunn in the Unity production, who talks with three terminally ill people — Joe, Brian, and Felicity. Earthy working man Joe (Peter Ray) has had treatment for the past six months. He is visited by his wife Maggie (Melissa Andrew) and son Steve (Finneas Brown).

“Joe’s son hasn’t seen him for six months,” says Boyce.

“Steve’s excited to see him because he thinks he’s better.”

Steve’s mother Maggie hasn’t told her son about the seriousness of Joe’s illness “because she doesn’t believe it.”

Julie McPhail plays Felicity, an older woman with partial dementia. She is cared for by her daughter Agnes, played by Zella Toia-Preston, who is depressed.

Liam Duncan plays Mark, Brian’s (James Packman) younger lover and the key to Brian’s emotional balance. Brian’s ex-wife, Beverly is a sexy, wild woman who needs to get drunk before she visits Brian.

Characters embody aspects of Kubler-Ross’s pattern of adjustment to impending death — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

“Cristofer used these “five stages of grief” as his focal points,” says Boyce.

“Maggie can’t tell her son about Joe because she is in denial, Felicity wants her other daughter to visit her so she is bargaining. Brian’s ex has to get drunk to visit, and much of the play’s humour is in these scenes, but Brian is the most accepting of his condition. His stance is ‘if I’m dying I must still be alive.’ He’s painting, he’s writing, he wants to leave a piece of himself behind.

“The play talks about death and dying as not a scary thing. It asks ‘what’s your life about?’ Not ‘what’s your death about?’” It’s about living in the now and experiencing relationships in the now. It asks the question ‘who are you? What makes you? What makes a person a person?’”.

The Shadow Box opens at Unity Theatre on August 17, 7.30pm.