BEETLE GRADUATION - THE AUSTRALIAN REVIEW

MOTHER LODE OF CRUELTY AND LOVE
by Murray Bramwell

You wouldn’t think a loving mother would call her daughter Beetle. But the relationship between mothers and daughters often can be a complicated mix of love and rivalry, enmeshed dependencies and heated defiance. Mothers carry vivid memories of growing up with their own mothers, then recreate old, often difficult patterns or, equally resolutely, initiate problematic new ones.

This transition from one female generation to the next is what writer Susan Rogers describes as the Beetle Graduation.

The strong-willed, unnamed mother in her play is vexed by, and in admiration of, her querulous parent and she astutely describes the contrasts between them.

But this does not help us understand why she perpetually refers to her own daughter, Miranda, as her plain little Beetle. It is though Prospero were treating his special child as if she were only ever Caliban.

In Brink Productions’ 60 minute two-hander we watch a series of exchanges: some flashbacks to when the child is seven, reciting her fierce little Beetle rhymes and spells against her careless mother; then at 40, nursing her cantankerous parent through the final stages of cancer. It is a trajectory to a form of resolution but marked with pain and seemingly unquenchable resentment.

Following his success with Andrew Bovell’s When The Rain Stops Falling in the 2008 Adelaide Festival, Brink director Chris Drummond has fashioned a meticulous miniature.

Wendy Todd’s elegantly spare set, Geoff Cobham’s probing and revealing lighting design and DJ TR!P’s pulsing sounds and pealing piano all merge in the gestalt.

The performances are excellent. As the mother, Carmel Johnson is grandly egotistical when, after cancer diagnosis, she flies straight to Rome and buys a splendid coat, then in a flashback is cruel as a cat to her mousey child.

As Beetle, Michaela Cantwell poignantly reveals the daughter’s fractured dignity and the feeling that she was better loved by the cleaning woman than her own mother. The conflicting mood swings of death and dying are convincingly captured by both players.

Rogers has written perceptively about a single mother and her only child but there are times, especially in the monologues when her ambitious text is cloyingly poetic and precision is lost in hollow cadence.

Beetle Graduation strongly evokes a familiar subject with tetchy affection and comic detail. It has no need for over-decorative flourishes that only detract from its success.