Ladies in Black; the Melbourne Theatre Company’s musical adaptation of Madeleine St John’s 1993 novel ‘The Women in Black’

by Adrian D’Ambra

I’ve been wanting to mention for some time that the Melbourne Theatre Company 2016 season couldn’t have gotten off to a better start than it did with ‘Ladies in Black’, a musical adaptation written by Carolyn Burns and Tim Finn of Madeleine St John’s 1993 novel ‘The Women in Black’. I have rarely so heartily enjoyed an evening of musical theatre as I did this one and I can only hope that the show will return to an extended season of its own in a much larger venue than The Sumner. This show is generous in humour and pathos and it richly deserves its own run and tour. Being perhaps the only theatre-goer in Melbourne who did not enjoy Simon Phillips’ 2015 MTC production of ‘North by Northwest’, I was a little unsure of what to expect but I thought that his production of ‘Ladies in Black’ was triumphant. Since seeing the show I have also read the novel for the first time, not having read anything by Madeleine St John before. Given her description of being born an Australian as an accident of history and her determination to expatriate herself in the UK, the novel is a remarkably lighthearted and sympathetic portrayal of life in Sydney in the late-1950s as seen through the eyes of school graduate Lisa who is just at the beginning of her adult life and just becoming aware of the limitations against which she is going to have to push if she is going to be able to give her life its own shape and meaning. Have I ever come across a better description of coming of age than this:

“She had never before been in town on a Saturday afternoon, and the episode, following upon the novelty of the interview for her very first job, induced a feeling of awful strangeness – and yet, of a certain ghostly familiarity; for Lisa believed herself to be in all likelihood a poet, and this experience seemed to her to be one about which one could certainly find oneself writing a poem, as long as one could manage to recall this feeling, this apprehension, of a world transformed, and oneself in it and with it: a sensation and an apprehension for which, for the moment, she had no precise words.” [Chapter 6]

I love that deft juxtaposition of ‘awful strangeness’ and ‘ghostly familiarity’ and the longer bow drawn between the ‘novelty’ of one event and the ‘apprehension’ of another. Lisa’s consciousness of her feelings and sensations and of the necessity and inadequacy of language to capture them is equally deft. On the other hand, the extent to which St John might be parodying or mocking her protagonist is unclear. Are we supposed to respect Lisa’s self-identification as a poet, to see it as the affectation of an ignorant and unenlightened child, or to read it as St John’s backhanded reflection on the impossibility of artistic and cultural aspiration in the Australia she grew up in and fled from? The Burns-Finn-Phillips take on this is clear. It is their intention that we spend at least a part of our evening in the theatre celebrating this brave young girl’s growing determination to be herself.