Brokentalkers theatre company has a reputation in Ireland for making powerful, innovative theatre. In Have I No Mouth, founding member Feidlim Cannon has collaborated with his mother Ann and co-director Gary Keegan to develop a work based upon the death of Feidlim’s baby brother, Sean and his father’s death which followed shortly after.The work reveals how baby Sean died just hours after he was born and, even though Ann had a strong sense something was wrong, hospital staff ignored her until it was too late. Her husband, also Sean, died the following year due to a misdiagnosis, despite Ann telling the surgeon about his other symptoms.
Feidlim Cannon is joined on stage by Ann Cannon and Erich Keller, the family’s actual psychotherapist, to recount their experience dealing with the emotional fall out of losing the two Seans and the long, futile law suit they launched against the hospital.
The play begins with Feidlim filling the audience in on this background and introducing Ann who is a Reiki specialist, colour therapist and studying to become an interfaith healer. Erich then takes the audience through a relaxation exercise. We are all invited to breathe deeply and become aware of the tension areas in our bodies etc. Later, Erich asks the audience to blow our pent up anger into a balloon and then, as a symbol of controlling our rage, to let the air out gently.
The play is often very good – comical, tragic, moving and richly imaginative. It makes use of life sized photos of the boys as children, video, photographs, music and old recordings to enrich the action on stage and employs a range of psychotherapeutic tropes – identifying objects with significance, re-enacting scenes from their past, recounting journal entries and the coroner’s report.
As much as I admire the performers for laying bare their lives to us, it occasionally felt awkward.
Being aware that the actors are playing themselves changes the way the play is viewed. My normal reactions to some of the things on stage was checked by my awareness of the need to be sensitive and respectful to these real people’s feelings. I had to be on their side or censor myself. As a testament of the experience of real people, I felt there was little room for interpretation.
I can understand why Feidlim and his mother might choose to make this piece of theatre as a way to work through their own, unresolved feelings about the death of baby Sean and their father/husband. It has hopefully provided a great cathartic experience for them.
As I watched them, however, I wondered how they could bring themselves to re-enact their harrowing response to the deaths in their family night after night, year after year. I kept wondering what it was doing to their personal wellbeing to relive their immense pain. Developing this play might well have been an invaluable process to help them to come to terms with what happened, but does continuing to perform it just rub salt into the wound? Instead of the psychotherapy acting as a device to heal their pain, it sometimes appeared to be a tool that shackled them to their grief and forced them to continue to indulge in their sadness.
I couldn’t help asking myself that if performing this play has allowed the Cannons to heal, then why isn’t this healing evident in the text? The press release for this production states that Have I No Mouth “is a journey that will continue to evolve with every performance”. If that is referring to a psychotherapeutic journey, then it appears to be a very long one. Years on, Feidlim’s anger is still unresolved. He starts out at the beginning of the play determinedly trying to cover up his pain, trying to be cheerful, and scolding his mother for wallowing in the depressing and the morose. As the play progresses he starts to give vent to his rage at his father’s death. The last section of the play sees Feidlim in full fury, recounting dreams in which he wants to slit the throat of the surgeon who caused his father’s death, repeatedly kicking a soccer ball at his father and, ultimately, dancing around the stage for so long and so furiously that I simultaneously lost interest and worried for his wellbeing.
Have I No Mouth will divide audiences. This is an excellent idea for a play, especially for those with an interest of psychotherapy or the use of drama in psychotherapy. It may well appeal to those who have experienced similar grief or rage due to the death of somebody close to them. On the other hand, it could equally act as an unwanted trigger for buried feelings of grief or alienate audience members that do not relate to the proceedings.
Brokentalkers presents
Have I No Mouth
Written and Directed by Feidlim Cannon & Gary Keegan
Venue: York Theatre | Seymour Centre, Corner City Road and Cleveland Street, Chippendale NSW
Dates: 15 – 18 January 2015
Tickets: $35
Bookings: 02 9351 7940
Part of the 2015 Sydney Festival
