Review: WELCOME TO YOUR NEW LIFE at Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Barry Lenny, Tuesday 14th November 2023.

The State Theatre Company of South Australia continues its 2023 season with the world premiere of Welcome to Your New Life, a new play, with a few songs, written by Anna Goldsworthy, and directed by Shannon Rush. Musical Director, Alan John, composed the songs.

Popular Adelaide concert pianist, author, and Director of the Elder Conservatorium of Music, Anna Goldsworthy, reflects on the experiences of her first pregnancy, and early motherhood. The first act covers the announcement of her pregnancy through to the birth, while the second act covers the first few years of her son’s life, up to the announcement of her second pregnancy. Her sons are now 14 and 10. She kept journals and these became her 2013 book, of the same title, which the company’s Artistic Director, Mitchell Butel, wisely convinced her to adapt into this play, assisted by dramaturg, Tim Overton.

Erin James plays Anna, Matt Crook plays the baby’s father, and Kathryn Adams plays her octogenarian grandmother with terminal cancer. Crook and Adams also play myriad other minor characters. At the start, Anna, a vegetarian, is craving meat. As the act continues there are plenty of laughs at the advice and instructions given to her by a range of characters. Does she really need a lactation consultant? Should she have got around to writing her birth plan? She discovers that labour pains are all too real, and not a social construct.

The second act has humour, but the mood changes as postnatal anxiety takes over. The couple are now suffering sleep deprivation, as the new mother sees nothing but hazards and dangers that might injure or kill her baby. He must be closely watched, night and day. Beware of the composting toilet. Her worsening paranoia eventually threatens to destroy the couple’s relationship.

This is, of course, a tour de force for Erin James, who commands the stage in a sterling performance as she negotiates the emotional rollercoaster from the start of the first pregnancy to the announcement of the second, and through the demise of the grandmother. She gets superb support from Matt Crook and Kathryn Adams who switch instantly between the most diverse ranges of characters, including a dog, with consummate ease. These three excellent performers have benefited from the inspired direction of Shannon Rush in crafting this captivating production.

Simon Greer’s set design is like an oversized nursery, dwarfing the cast. The stage is painted with a large circle divided into various coloured squares, and large, coloured, numbered blocks are around the rear of this area. A lounge chair, a piano, a shelf unit with lettered blocks, and a child’s mobile hanging above it all, complete the set, which is lit by Gavin Norris. In the second act, the coloured blocks have gone, replaced by monochromatic substitutes, reflecting the change in mood.

The rather forgettable and, to my mind, superfluous music is partly recorded and partly live. While James sits at the piano and sings, a glockenspiel, ukulele, and toy piano are also played occasionally by Adams and Crook, who add vocals of their own.

This has been a great year of productions from the State Theatre Company, for which Mitchell Butel is to be congratulated, and this play is another in what has been an unbroken series of successes.

Photography, Matt Byrne.