Writer: Julia Hales, with Finn O’Branagáin and Clare Watson
Director: Clare Watson
There was a time when British television audiences were obsessed with Australian soap operas. The biggest, of course, was Neighbours; when that soap dominated the BBC1 teatime schedule, ITV snapped up Aussie competitor Home and Away, whose mix of sun-kissed beaches and troubled teenagers made for a heady brew.
Julia Hales, an actor from Perth in Western Australia, has been a lifelong fan of the show. Her love for Home and Away forms the central spine of her engaging documentary theatre piece about what it is like for her, and several of her friends, to live with Down syndrome.
While the Purcell Room stage is slowly turned into a recreation of the Summer Bay Diner from the series – evocatively and cheaply recreated using metallic bistro tables and chrome smoothie cups – Hales intersperses clips of the show with longer, more meaningful interviews with other Australians with Down syndrome. The interviews focus on love – what each person thinks love is, their own experiences with love, and their dreams for the future.
Several of the interviewees join Hales on stage. Actor and dancer Lauren Marchbank is the most outgoing of these, revelling in the live performance aspect as much as she does sitting in the diner area, contributing to the conversational parts of Hales’s work.
And that is what is most special about Hales’s approach. Everybody who comes on stage – from Hales’s childhood friend Joshua Bott, who comes on stage to moonwalk to a Michael Jackson number, to Mark and Melissa Junor, who talk about their courtship and 20-year marriage – not only shares their own experience about living with Down syndrome but remains on stage, building into a true community with each addition.
Audience members are brought on, too, to play roles in scenes Hales has written as if she were in her favourite soap, which to date has never had a character with Down. This forms the strongest link betweenHome and Away and Hales’s theatrical piece.
There are some mentions of resonances the childhood Hales felt with the show – she was the same age as the show’s youngest starting cast member; her mother was one of 13 children, the same number as caravan park matriarch Pippa ended up fostering or adopting on the show – but beyond the theatre show’s visual recreation of Home and Away’s original paint brush-style opening titles, repurposed as projected backdrops, the connections between the onstage work and the TV show could perhaps be even stronger.
But that would, however, detract from the true message in Hales’s piece. For it is not really about how Hales wants to be on her favourite soap, but about enlightening us all to life as someone with Down syndrome. Another taped interview introduces us to a mother who, when pregnant, had severe health problems that could threaten her baby’s chances of survival: upon discovery that her unborn child had the extra chromosome that causes the syndrome, doctors were reticent to provide the sort of interventions that would prevent her from miscarrying.
Earlier generations of people with Down might end up institutionalised for life, and even today the detection of the chromosomal syndrome in foetuses is used as a reason for abortion. Hales introduces us to these concepts but does not dwell on them; for this is a show about the positives. That same mother describes how, upon giving birth and her baby became a person rather than a bundle of probabilities and perceived problems, she saw the truth: while her son may have physical and developmental issues due to his extra chromosome, his capacity for love would outshine everything else.
And with a coda that sees Hales partly realise her dream of reaching Summer Bay, the same is true here – You Know We Belong Together demonstrates a capacity for love that, for all in the room, is transcendent.
Reviewed on 19 August, then at Edinburgh International Festival, 24-27 August 2022
The Reviews Hub Score
Engaging
