The White Album

by Joan Didion

seen at the Roslyn Packer Theatre (Sydney) on 11 January 2020

Lars Jan and the Early Morning Opera group devised this staged adaptation of Joan Didion's celebrated essay on culture and counter-culture in the 1960s, with Mia Barron taking the principal part of reciting the text, five others taking minor parts, and a score or so of 'volunteers' providing the crowd background. It is part of this year's Sydney Festival.

On a bare stage with a wide box-like space at the back fronted by perspex floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding doors people mill about until the performance starts. Then an introductory exercise stills the cast (and the audience) and the recitation begins. Some aspects of the events Didion recounts and ruminates upon are acted out, or emblematically evoked, either on the stage or within the box: there is a particularly effective use of the white wall at the back to create slogans during the sequence concerning university sit-ins, and a slow motion enactment of gun violence in relation to the Manson murders.

Didion's purpose was to recount without over-interpretative explanation of what was happening, though inevitable we in the audience are habituated to create stories of cause and effect from what we hear. But the essay itself is not a story, and its highly literate polish works against any dramatic storyline. Episodes are demarcated by announcing scene, or rather chapter, numbers, and Didion's voice remains mostly neutral, intelligent, occasionally waspish.

The drawback, for a contemporary Australian audience, is that all the events in Didion's purview are decidedly American - the Black Panthers, political assassinations, The Doors, the student sit-ins, and the Manson murders. Also, they are receding beyond the experience of many in the audience, being now over fifty years old. However, the essay itself retains its power and the recitation was good.

At the end, a 15-minute 'koan' conversation was initiated, whereby actors and audience could make observations, preferably non-combative (each person was advised to speak only once). The ball was set rolling by the observation that 2070 looks impossibly in the future, while 1970 looks only in the recent past; here we are in 2020 in the midpoint between the two (chronologically), yet perhaps not feeling in the midpoint (psychologically). But the points raised quickly turned to the issue of pressures for change and the role - perhaps the necessity - for violence in overcoming problems. Someone I was with observed afterwards that six months ago a Sydney theatre-going audience might well not have raised such concerns so persistently, but in the wake of the recent and ongoing bushfire emergency a new spirit of questioning and alertness has emerged. It's certainly true that the discussion moved quickly away from questions of temporality, to the disquiet many feel about the present situation in the country and the world at large.