"It's a powerful play. The characters are absolutely believable," Kerry Girdwood says of The Dignity of Risk. "It's a topical play. In the early 1990s patients in mental health institutions were sent out into the community and there were very powerful arguments for that. How could they learn to copein a normal community if they weren't living in a normal community? That might have worked if they'd had adequate support around them but the support was never enough."
Joan Rosier-Jones wrote the play and experienced thespian Kerry advised on the practicalities of staging. "We trimmed it until we had a play we were both happy with." Cast out of hospital, the three principal characters find themselves in a halfway house with a reluctant landlady who makes no secret of the fact she wants to be shot of them. When they find themselves without a home their attempts to find comfort and security together end in disaster. "People were let down by the health system. If they were not coping they might have taken to the bottle, or if they felt good they might have stopped taking their meds. We've got a pretty high suicide rate too. Mike King and John Kirwin have done a lot to remove a lot of the stigma around depression but we still have a long way to go," says Kerry.
"The dignity of risk was a phrase that was constantly and cynically repeated. These people were vulnerable, needing support, not risks."
The staging of The Dignity of Risk, timed to coincide with the Whanganui Literary Festival, has a pertinent social message. Under Kerry Girdwood's sensitive guidance this play promises to have lessons for us all.
