Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Saturday 31st May 2014
The Tutti Ensemble has an enviable record in creating performances which smoothly integrate actors and musicians of all levels of ability, some of whom face immense challenges in participating in the works. Founder, Pat Rix, and her teams have given Adelaide audiences a chance to witness human endeavour.
The latest production,
Eye Music, goes deeper than most, and triggers questions about the personal autonomy of the severely disabled, and the confused motives and behaviours of their carers and families. The importance of that almost outweighs the show itself. Rix has written the show with the assistance of Jem's family, but you wonder what they make of their portrayals.
In Eye Music the company tells the story of a former member, Jem or Jeremy Hartgen. Suffering a fractured skull in a car accident at the age of nine months meant a life in a wheelchair with only bare physical control. He communicated almost entirely through blinking his eyes, which is where the title originates. In an almost linear biographical process we see him with his adoptive mother, Sylvia, Jacqy Phillips, her daughter Jackie, Tamara Lee, Jackie's son Possum, Brenton John Shaw, and the other adopted child Joel, Roy Stewart. Sylvia is a godfearing woman, constantly invoking God and Jesus as her motive for caring for two seriously disabled children, and it comes as a shock to her, and indeed to the audience, when Jem orders her and Joel out of the house, 'my money, my house'. He makes his own family with Jackie and Possum. Any happiness is surely transitory as Possum commits suicide. Jem manages, despite his almost immobile state, to lose his virginity to 'Wendy',
Kathryn Hall, who dies in a house fire with her mother.
The final crisis comes when, at the age of 26 Jem decides to end his life by starving himself to death. All this is pretty much public record. Many people in the company worked with, and indeed loved Jem. Roy Stewart, a young company member, brings a wide eyed energy and comic timing as Joel, one of Tutti's most successful graduates as a dancer and actor.
The pivotal role of Jem is taken by Anton Sagrillo, whose cerebral palsy confines him to wheelchair, and who speaks through a voice synthesiser, so he sounds like Steven Hawking, and the Bliss symbols (look it up on the internet), by which he communicates, are flashed up on the screen as he invokes them. He's helped in this by his support worker, Elliott Galvin, and a real sense of enjoyment is clear in his performance.
The show is very moving, and Edwin Kemp Attrill has kept the action fluid. There are well integrated film clips, by Nic Mollison and James Kurtze, and an engaging musical score from composer, Alies Sluiter, highlighted by the singing of Alistair Brasted as Jem's inner voice. The weakness is in the scenes between the mother and the daughter. Phillips as Sylvia and Lee as Jackie are two of our most accomplished stage performers dealing with clichéd dialogue. I know it's virtually impossible to sum up all the emotional depth and complexity of people whose lives militate against them ever being fully capable of exploring and communicating their own inner lives, whether they are severely disabled or simply unused to articulating their deepest thoughts.
But, as I said that the beginning, while the show is a tribute to a remarkable personality, it's the questions that remain after the tears have dried that make this so important a contribution to the ongoing conversation. What is the place of the arts in a person's life, disabled or otherwise, and how do the able among us respond to the growing sense of personal autonomy that the arts, especially in companies like the Tutti Ensemble, have allowed disabled people to develop.
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