In Conversation with Dr. Kathleen Mary Fallon | Ms Julie Gabler: Trapped

Today in our Backstage Blog, we spoke with Dr. Kathleen Mary Fallon - the producer, director and writer of Ms Julie Gabler: Trapped.

Moving beyond the simplistic, ineffectual and judgemental slogans – ‘monstrous’, ‘bad’,  ‘evil’, ‘patriarchal’, ‘misogynistic’ Ms Julie Gabler: trapped focuses a penetrating spotlight into the cultural dislocation, sexual and psychological torment of the perpetrators of domestic violence whilst, most importantly, highlighting the often unseen escalating risks and the terrible dangers of naivety for the partners and friends.

Q: What a concept for a show! I have to ask first about inspirations.

A: The instigating incidence for Ms Julie Gabler: trapped occurred in 2013 after a DV incidence with my then partner, an Indigenous man, that necessitated police intervention. My way of dealing with this, as always, was to write. As I conceived, wrote, workshopped and re-wrote the script my life-history of gendered violence found its way into the play.

Both my brother and my father suffered morbid jealousy (the ‘Othello syndrome’) which impacted my adolescence greatly and, really, had life-long consequences. I was shunned, emotionally abused and also suffered a number of incidence of extreme violence at the hands of both my parents as a result of their mistaken beliefs that I was a liar, sneaky and sexually active. I only understood all this decades later but, by then, much damage had been done.

In 1972, at the age of 22, I fostered a Torres Strait Islander boy who lived with disabilities until his death in 2015. His disabilities were the result of his birth father’s physical abuse based on his morbid jealousy towards his mother on Thursday Island. (My three-part project - the SBS feature film, Call Me Mum;  my play, Buyback, [the sequel to the film], which I directed at Carlton Courthouse in 2006 and my novel Paydirt [UNAPress] explores this situation.)

In 1998 I trained as a telephone counsellor with the now defunct Care Ring in Melbourne and worked as a voluntary telephone counsellor for over three years. During this time, given their anonymity, I was privy to the unrestrained outpourings of sexist and misogynist hatred, anger and simmering violence from men who rang through. If the men stayed on the line, and I could talk with them, their acute fear of what they were capable of, their self-hatred and lack of self-worth became tragically apparent. Any number of these conversations ended in the men sobbing uncontrollably and in tears.

These conversations and the complexity of the situations found their way into the play. So, rather than relying on simplistic, ineffectual and judgemental slogans such as ‘monstrous’, ‘bad’,  ‘evil’, ‘patriarchal’, ‘misogynistic’ Ms Julie Gabler: trapped shines a strong spotlight into the cultural dislocation, sexual and psychological torment of the perpetrators of domestic violence. Not in any way as an excuse for their behaviour but as a warning to the women in the audience that they probably don’t realise what they’re up against. I certainly didn’t! The play highlights these terrible dangers of naivety for the partners and friends. Women in danger are often in denial, think we can fix things, be reasonable, placate, manipulate, manage and we don’t see the red flags until it’s too late. I want the women in the audience to see, very clearly those red flags before it is too late for them.

Also, when I saw, last year, that 103 women had been murdered and 20 of those were First Nations women, I was determined to get the play produced. As you’ll see from the 2016 support letter from Relationships Australia Victoria they ‘believe Miss Julie Gabler: trapped makes an important, vital contribution to a complex social issue through courageous and intimate storytelling..’

Q: Where did the idea for this reimagined work come from?

A: It seemed a no-brainer, given my experiences of DV with an Indigenous man, to conceptualise the play as something of a contemporary Othello. However, I wanted to do more than that, I wanted to show how we are all ‘trapped’ in the Western cultural tradition. So, by making the three characters in the play professional actors we see how they construct and perform their lives and relationships within its theatrical context. I used the ‘conversations’ between Strindberg’s misogyny and morbid jealousy (The father is almost a clinically description of morbid jealousy)  and Ibsen’s proto-feminism (the door slamming shut in A Doll’s House). We’re steeped in it - like biscuits in tea - and there’s no ‘out’. All we can do is become more and more conscious of how we perform it or, indeed, how it performs us. It’s a coming to consciousness, a decolonisation if you like.

Ruth Gilmore, the actor playing Julie, put it this way:

"I was particularly struck by how the play refracts and reframes the canon: the Ibsen/Strindberg/Othello “game” is as playful as it is harrowing, and the way you subvert the ending tropes of A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler is utterly brilliant. I love that this script speaks fluently with the past while smashing it open at the same time."

Q: Did you refer to the original texts much while assembling the work? Or did you take what you needed and run free?

A: Implementing this I took what I needed from all three canonic texts using a variety of techniques and strategies e.g. the characters are all involved in an upcoming production of Othello. Robert, the male lead’s Masters thesis is called, ‘Strindberg: the man who knew the truth’ and as he rehearses the part of Othello it triggers his morbid jealousy; Julie and Robert play a ‘game of quotes’ which morphs from playful to intimidating.

I am so bored with the repetition of the already said - interminable productions of the ‘classics’ and the sometimes ridiculous or disastrous interventions when some director wants to update them. A few years ago I actually forked out on a red-plush ticket-seat to an MTC production of Miss Julie, a play I dislike intensely but thought I should go as it might help as I worked on Ms Julie Gabler: trapped. So, lavish production with all MTC’s high production values and great acting. However, I actually yelped when, at the end, the director decided that, given the new-found concern and publicity around DV, he just couldn’t have Julie shoot herself so at the critical moment, when she takes the revolver and is on her way to shoot herself, the maid intervenes, mumbles something - I think the actors were embarrassed because they mumbled something like, ‘You don’t need to do this. Come with me and we’ll start a women’s collective’. (I made that up. Either I was too shocked or they really mumbled.) Thus destroying any dramaturgical sense the rotten play made.  As the audience filed out I continued to embarrass myself     as I heard the two red-plush women in front of me say, None of them were very nice people were they?’ Why do we bother?

Q: What will surprise people about this work?

A: I think the raw honesty and intensity of how the ‘ethnically ambiguous’ (hate that term!) characters grapple with the multi-layered and fraught complexities of the cultural terrorisms of race, gender and sexuality. In Ms Julie Gabler: trapped I put into practice what  Anthony Kubiak says in his,  'Stages of Terror’ - ‘ theatre is not merely a means by which social behaviour is engineered, it is the site of violence, the locus of terror's emergence as myth, law, religion, economy, gender, class, or race, either in the theatre, or in culture as a theatricality that paradoxically precedes culture ... theatre is the site in which cultural consciousness and identity come into being through fear; it is the proleptic locus of terror's transformation from thought into culture and its terrorisms’.

There’s serious violence in the play but it’s anti-violent violence rather than non-violent violence. I make use of my theorising of what I call Antidotal Theatre (of violence) rather than the usual liberal-humanist fare I call Anecdotal Theatre (of passivity).  As a writer I want to exploit more subtle, sensitive, sophisticated and hopefully more potent and generative ways of engagement with race, gender, sexuality than those afforded by the liberal-humanist conceptual framework, belief system. In this system, theatre, the arts in general, supposedly have an educative, polemical function.

Anecdotal Theatre (of passivity) is the term I use for the theatre which emerges from this liberal-humanist belief system, with its reliance on positive role models, educative, informative and explanatory modes, its comfortable bourgeois consumption as entertainment or art (whose appetite requires a soupçon of 'challenge' which is actually nothing more than the same old meal rehashed to appear 'new' and 'confronting' by clever cooks, a sort of spin-doctored, value-added, cliche), its established set of aesthetic values. These are mobilised as a means of engineering social behaviour, maintaining cultural cohesion, telling the stories of the tribe and so forth. This is embedded in, the truisms of actors and directors in phases such as, 'gut - feeling', 'it feels right'. These claims to instinctuality and intuition are really, I believe, nothing more than the passive 'naturalised', 'normalised' operations of these value-added cliches in Anecdotal Theatre (of Passivity). Therefore I try to take nothing for granted; I try to interrogate every aspect.

Antidotal Theatre (of violence) is really a critique of this belief system and its practices, a deconstruction, but it is not simply oppositional in a radical, avant-gardist sense. It is anti-racist rather than non-racist: anti-violent rather than non-violent. It eschews the belief that empathy leads to understanding and therefore change, a corner­ stone concept in Anecdotal Theatre (of passivity). But this comer-stone is not simply disavowed and ignored as if I could somehow make it disappear from the consciousness of the audience. It is obviously part of the vocabulary of theatrical practice and expectation. Rather than reifying it into a sacred and static structure and stricture (corner-stone) to be imposed, I see it as a conglomeration of potentialities, as a verb rather than a noun. I have acknowledged the pleasures of the text inherent in feelings of empathy and understanding, exploited them and interrogated them simultaneously, a technique of deconstruction.

Q: What has been the most memorable moment in your process?

A: The auditioning process was itself memorable with passionate responses for or against the play.

Then there were these responses:

" am Zac Rose and I am honoured to represent my fellow brothers and sisters of the Gundijmara country and participate in this production. Ms Julie Gabler: trapped feels incredibly important. It is one of the most powerful scripts I’ve ever had the privilege of reading.  It’s a societal wake-up call to action, rallying people to make changes and put an end to domestic violence. I’m grateful to be a part of it.’ Zac is one of the musicians and also the understudy for Robert and Malcolm."

Then it warmed my heart when, late one night, I read this response from Ruth Gilmore, who plays Julie:

"I’ve just finished reading the script and I needed to reach out immediately; I’m genuinely shaken, in the best way. It’s one of the most raw, linguistically visceral and emotionally arresting pieces I’ve read in a long time."

And Sermsah bin Saad, who plays Robert, appreciating the anti-violence violence of his character:

"The play holds up a powerful mirror for men who act abusively."

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Ms Julie Gabler: Trapped plays at Explosives Factory from July 30 - August 9.

Click here to get your tickets!