The Year of Magical Thinking

Well, last Thursday we were treated to my kind of cultural experience. Tom Price may be 16,000 kms from the nearest city but because Rio Tinto is a big financial supporter of the Black Swan Theatre Company, based in Perth, we are occasionally visited by travelling productions from the city. This time it was Joan Didon's "The Year of Magical Thinking".

Now I'm the first to admit I had no idea who Joan Didion was before seeing the performance, but I was so impressed with the production that I did a bit of googling afterwards and learned a little more.

The play is a stage adaptation of Joan Didion's best-selling, Pulitzer prize-nominated memoir and is an exquisite chronicle of the terrible year during which she was forced to deal with her daughter's life-threatening illness and the sudden death of her husband, John Dunne. John died more or less instantly, and 18 months later, after making a partial recovery, Quintana, her daughter, died of acute pancreatitis, at the age of 39. They were a high-profile literary couple in the United States. Joan was a journalist, freelance writer and novelist and John, a novelist, screenwriter, and critic. His most notable films are "A Star is Born" and "True Confessions".

Helen Morse played the lead and only character. I could only remember seeing her before in the movie "Far East", but upon some more research discovered she appeared in "Caddie", "Picnic at Hanging Rock" and a few other films in the 70s an 80s. She was wonderful and had me fully enthralled for the entire 1 hour and 45 minutes.

She was accompanied on stage by a cellist, Melanie Robinson, who played the haunting music especially composed for this production.

It was a compelling performance and made me realise why I sometimes miss the big cities. I just love live performances of theatre, opera and dance. I know it's a cliche, but I wanted to be an actress when I was younger. I did a few productions at school and university, but really it was a dream that I didn't want enough. I saw how difficult a task it was when a friend from school did her drama course and appeared in only the odd advertisement or episode of a dreary Australian drama. But live performances are fabulous and the heady experience of entering the darkened theatre room and watching others perform in front of me is thrilling and 'magical'.

Thank you Black Swan and thank you Rio Tinto for making these things occasionally possible.