Photographer Kirra Cheers

It’s hard to review shows like the State Theatre Company of South Australia’s The 7 Stages of Grieving. Often, reviews are a place to dissect and analyse: to explore a performance at an intellectual level. 7 Stages, with its subject matter and Lisa Flanagan’s extraordinary performance, almost defies this kind of analysis. It is a performance that should be seen with an open heart.

Skillfully directed by Rosalba Clemente, a veteran of the Adelaide theatre scene, the performance consists of a series of vignettes, stories and memories about mourning and grief. Each is related by Lisa Flanagan, who performs with remarkable power and truth as an Indigenous ‘Everywoman’. Many of the stories are terrible in their power and sadness. There are stories of police discrimination and gross physical violence, through to stories of alienation, indignity and small racist acts.

Such a summary, though, doesn’t do justice to the performance’s subtleties. It may sound depressing, and certainly, it is: or at least, very confronting because it hits so close to home, and engages with the audience in such an intimate way. But despite this, there are still moments of wonderful humour and tenderness, and the play is ultimately a hopeful experience.

What makes 7 Stages, in many ways, is the phenomenal performance of Lisa Flanagan. Flanagan performs each of the stories herself; singing, dancing, screaming, laughing and crying her way through the lives of the characters she remembers and inhabits. With this performance, she achieves one of theatre’s most difficult feats: speaking, not only for her characters as themselves, but for the whole cultural history of pain, grief, and loss that stands above and around them. Her sincerity is both moving and engaging. Somewhere between the first story and the last, the stories she tells begin to transcend themselves.

The technical and design aspects of the performance contribute to its strength. Morag Cook’s simple, clean set design, with its wooden circular stage and hollows for red sand, provides a clear space for the stories to unfold. David Gadsden’s lighting and Stuart Day’s sound, particularly the use of spoken voice and projection of text onto objects, each add to the performance while ensuring that the content and power of Flanagan’s storytelling remains the central focus.

The script was originally written in the mid-nineties, by well-known Indigenous artists Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman. It is progressively updated, and so this year’s performance includes reflections on the 2000 Reconciliation Walk and the Prime Minister’s 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generations. The fluidity in the script and performance is profoundly hopeful in itself, because 7 Stages is not a fictional story, or a story only about the past, but rather a story of the real world, and the present, as well. The scenes that currently stand at the performance’s conclusion are some of the most powerful of all. The possibility of another update in five or ten years time brings with it a great deal of promise and responsibility for the further progress towards healing that might to be made.

This, then, is one of 7 Stages’ greatest achievements: that it reminds its audience of the power and truth of stories. So many words have been written, and spoken, about the traumas of Australia’s history, and the displacement of its Indigenous peoples. But often, all these words don’t seem to amount to very much. In the end, the message of 7 Stages seems to be that stories, simply told and humbly heard, are a way to begin the process of healing.

At the end of the performance I saw, Lisa Flanagan returned and answered questions from the audience of high school students. At one point, responding to a question about the show’s ‘meaning’ and her inspiration for performing it, she said that the show wasn’t designed to finger-point. Her inspiration was her people, and the show was a show about stories. It was an exchange between human beings, rather than a presentation from performer to audience.

Performances like 7 Stages tell their stories in a way that can’t easily be described using words. The experience is such a humbling and powerful one that it’s best to let 7 Stages speak for itself.

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