The 7 Stages of Grieving By Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman
Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company, Subiaco Arts Centre
Until 12 July, 7.30pm, Approx. 65 min (no interval)

A lone female sits on the ground and pours from her hand a perfect sand circle, then fills it with neat blobs. It’s an evocative image in several ways – perfect dots nestled inside a closed circle that so powerfully symbolises Indigenous family strength.

The image is simultaneously captured from above and projected onto a series of fabric drapes behind her, offering a bird’s eye perspective of the pattern that so many Aboriginal artists adopt in depicting country. 

And then the young woman smites the sand dots with her fist, mimicking the casual cruelty of native welfare that destroyed family circles with child removal. Again, the imagery is potent, the circle open and raw red.  The young woman talks of sorrow and emptiness. “I feel nothing.”

The 7 Stages of Grieving is a thirty-year-old Australian classic, as powerful as the day it was written by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman, who attended opening night in Perth. The play is in safe creative hands with this Yirra Yaakin production; after many stage outings, the play is enjoying its first production by an Indigenous theatre company. 

Actor-director Bobbi Henry and her all-women production crew (apart from production manager Troy Williams) have put their own stamp on this work, adding layers of visual prompts and sound landscapes to the stark simplicity of a one-woman show.

Originally written for Mailman, who toured the show in the 1990s to huge acclaim, the solo role is performed on different nights by Shahnee Hunter or Shontane Farmer.

On opening night, it was Hunter who stepped into the limelight in a skirt, shirt and bare feet, and began crooning the loss of an invisible child. The coolamon she nurses has been removed from a Perspex display cabinet and laid in the sand, a symbol perhaps of humanity reclaimed from a museum setting and a brutal colonial past. 

The play is a series of vignettes that adroitly capture many stages in that history – Hunter adopts the persona of ‘Everywoman’ who has seen children removed, youth provoked into prison time, bewildered relatives who no longer know where they fit.  “We have been taught to cry quietly,” she observes. 

The alternately sharp and poetic script provides Hunter with evocative lines, like “My children, stolen away to a safe place, were wrenched from familiar arms and forced to feed upon another tongue.” A peaceful protest is seen by a reporter as a ‘defiant Aboriginal march but Everywoman observes that “This is the only way we can get our story told.”

Hunter is so adept at transforming from character to character that she seems to channel the very spirits and voices of our nation’s history. She is aided by minimal but intelligent choice of props – a series of museum-like cabinets, a lace table cloth, a teacup, a battered suitcase. She enters and exits through seven cloth panels, onto which are projected flower blossoms, family snapshots, official race documents and the many words for grief.

The flawless synthesis of visual and sound design is noteworthy, thanks to the creative team of Jess Gatt, Janine Oxenham, Charlotte Meagher, Rebecca Riggs-Bennett, Kristie Smith and Emma Fishwick.

Tiny luminous moments offer respite. Hunter opens a suitcase and the word ‘Reconciliation’ appears in the inside lid. She gives a lovely description of Aboriginal mourning of dead relatives; their snapshots stowed away in the suitcase are “passing time until they can be talked of again.”

More uplifting moments illustrate the resilience of a culture and its people. The young woman comically attempts to describe the complex world of moieties – how Indigenous people must marry within their own “skin”. A simple explanation defeats even her. 

In another instant, with a cheeky twirl and sassy glance, Hunter is a teenager girl who delights in seeing her black face in the mirror. Her self-pride acts like a shield, off which bounce a myriad racial slurs and daily slights, like the ‘special’ changing room for black girls she’s directed to in a store. It’s bleakly hilarious, and so is Hunter’s deadly performance.

When it debuted in 1995, 7 Stages was seen as a radical act of Aboriginal theatre-making. Time has passed, but not enough change has occurred between the play’s first and latest iteration. It is a vivid snapshot of past history, but regrettably also of current injustices. 

Enoch is spot-on when he says that every performance of 7 Stages “becomes a call to listen, to feel, and to reckon – with history, with justice, with ourselves.”

The 7 Stages of Grieving continues until 12 July.

For more information, visit:
https://yirrayaakin.com.au/production/the-7-stages-of-grieving/