THE PASSION OF PAULINE Comes to Melbourne Fringe Festival 2024

Possibly like nothing you’ve seen before The Passion of Pauline is the reenactment of a real criminal trial performed as a TV game show. The audience acts as the jury and nightly decides the contestant’s fate. A mix of live performance and multimedia the judge, barrister, and witnesses are all talking chimpanzees relayed via video. 

Every night is different, but it’s always funny in this dramedy that is always heavy, and always worth it. The show encapsulates what the world has woken up to these last few years with themes around the millions suffering under a broken justice system. St John McKay, the brains behind this performance come fundraiser has teamed up with Australian criminal justice non-profits with all ticket sales donated between them.

The Passion of Pauline tells the true story of Pauline Campbell who was put on trial for her years of campaigning against the injustices she saw in the systems supposed to protect us. When this reserved retiree’s teenage daughter died in prison she was suddenly organising, protesting, and forcefully being arrested by police in the cause of improving or, in the end, outright abolishing prisons. Naturally, the government tried to lock her up in one. Pauline’s day in court was nothing but a farce, a monkey trial and a pompous gameshow. St John postulated history deserved a rerun, with the lights and the pizzaz, absurdity and mayhem of a show.

New Zealander St. John McKay, writer/director/solo performer of The Passion of Pauline, has lived all over the world; from Argentina to Iceland, Japan to the USA and has made the focus of his work dark and difficult issues we prefer to look away from. The artist hopes this will generate exposure for these causes and hopefully shift the needle. No stranger to Fringe Festivals, this piece is the culmination of four years of work and is a particularly personal story for St. John. 

“When I was a baby my mother went to prison for 6 months, and she’s never told another soul the details of what she calls ‘that time in hell’.” Said St John McKay. “Over my strange life I’ve had tiny periods in jail cells myself, in 5 countries … And I can understand why.” 

This live documentary about the feminist prison activist and abolitionist Pauline Campbell doesn’t merely wish to tell a forgotten hero’s story. It strives to further her mission.

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