I’m With Her
Lead Writer: Victoria Midwinter Pitt
Director: Victoria Midwinter Pitt
Eternity Playhouse, Darlinghurst
November 9 – December 1, 2019
Described as “a piece of theatre that talks to the #MeToo movement … from real Australian women, whose experiences we could learn from and be inspired by”, I’m With Her fulfills its brief with compelling energy and conviction.
From private acts of protest to public triumphs, this production brings the real-life stories of nine Australian women into the theatre. Ranging in age, ethnicity, religion, expertise and notability, the stories of each of these remarkable women – Dr Anne Aly, counter-terrorism expert and Labor MP, Julie Bates AO, safe sex educator and sex worker, Dr Marion Blackwell, environmental scientist, Pam Burridge, world champion surfer, the Hon. Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister, Nikki Keating, bartender and sexual harassment campaigner, Professor Marcia Langton AM, Foundation Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, Sister Patricia Madigan, Catholic nun, and Erin Phillips, AFL champion footballer – bear personal witness not only to male exploitation and suppression but also, and more importantly, to female fight-back.
Five engaging and accomplished actors – Gabrielle Chan (Madigan), Shakira Clanton (Burridge and Langton), Lynette Curran (Bates and Blackwell), Deborah Galanos (Gillard and Aly) and Emily Havea (Keating and Phillips) – bring these at once unique but similar stories of struggle, protest and survival to life on the stage. Each story is important in filling out a bigger picture, but in each there is a moment in which we are floored by an insight given into ourselves and our situation.
These moments are not the darker insights. There are plenty of those and many concern either the way in which the female body is assumed to be the property of, or at the least, a temporary annexation by, the male or the denigration of, and conspiracy to undermine, the female’s capacity to achieve. The most moving moments are those in which a woman realises she has the power to take a stand. As Keating says, “I think everyone saw that I had spoken up [against sexual assault] and it didn’t destroy me”, or sex-worker Bates’s powerful statement of autonomy, “… you can’t hold a boundary until you believe that the territory inside it is yours. Yours.” We can reply with Madigan when asked if God has a gender, “Definitely not!”
A very strong moment is created by the fusion of Burridge’s insights with the well-known story of Julia Gillard. Burridge, after recovering from a savage loss of confidence, at last fulfills the desire of her 12-year-old self by winning the World Surfing Championship in 1990. She won, she says, because she “finally learn[ed] to surf not just up but down.” As Gillard warns us that feminism has always come in waves and every wave creates a backlash inherited by the next generation, Burridge steps forward re-affirming her insight – she had to learn “to attack going down”.
Gillard calls us all to action. “We’ve got to get the fortitude, now,” she says “to call it what it [the backlash] is and push it back. All of us. Early and hard.” Wise words and true. While now we rejoice with Phillip that girls can “do the things that really fit [them]” – Phillips was a champion basketballer rather than the champion footy player she wanted to be – and that girls, unlike the currently 92-year-old Blackwell, who, refused entry at the front door of Sydney University, had to go “around the side”, can now take a direct path into tertiary education, “we are not” as Gillard says, “in that equal world we thought we were”.
To keep our present gains and ride the wave as it goes down we need to act on the advice of Marcia Langton, a powerful advocate for Aboriginal women who suffer increasing and disproportionate violence at the hands of husbands or boyfriends. “The world is run by those who show up,” she says, “I’ve been around a long time. I show up.” As Clanton gazes steadfastly into her audience she asks, demands, of us that if we really want change, we have to “show up”. Not just go to the theatre and applaud, perhaps, but then the theatre is inspirational.
Let us not calm down. While the absolute irritation of Aly’s mother’s command to her young self – “Don’t think too much. You go mad and no one will marry you” – is familiar still, the advice to her as an abused wife and a denigrated parliamentarian – “That’s the way it is” – is not only annoying but degrading and dangerous. “If that’s the way it is,” Aly says, “then the way it is needs to change.”
The use of back projection throughout the performance is excellent. An awe-inspiring wave and the awe-inspiring Bungle Bungles as backdrops to Burridge and Blackwell respectively and effectively show the wonder of the worlds that motivated them and the violence of the barrage of insult, defamation and threats hurled at those women who stand up and stand out, is powerfully conveyed through colour, size and zoom.
