Unspoken

Could you cope with the stress of growing up and knowing your younger brother was profoundly disabled? Can you imagine the needs of keeping a family together under such stress, the emotional traumas which would come with knowing your brother needed constant care and attention? Would you deal with it, or run off to university to escape the daily grind of helping out the family?

Such was the choice facing Rebecca Clarke, for her one woman performance in 'Unspoken' is quite definitely rooted in truth.

"Some of the characters were - compressed - scenes were changed to emphasise a point or assist the narrative I guess, but it is a device to show the two sides..." she confirms. Can such a play take on the personas of 'Good cop' and 'Bad cop', I ask? We laugh. "I tried to make sure everyone was human; the same with myself.

"I wonder whether can you relate to all the characters, but in my case I tried that because it seemed the best way to go."

Did she ever reach that point when writing the play that it had to be either fact or fiction, I question?

"I don't recall that I ever reached that point; I didn't even really comprehend that. The question for me was more whether I was taking any dramatic license in pouring out the story."

'Unspoken' is a one woman show for Clarke, who wrote the script then developed the play over the course of a few seasons. She did a three week season last year, which gave her a chance to revisit the work and fine tune some of the staging, and for 2006 agreed to bring the play to Adelaide for a season with Vitalstistix Theatre, under the helm of a new director.

"I'm really looking forward to coming to Adelaide," Clarke enthuses. "What I'm going to have to do is get a feel for what people see in the play - so long as I keep true to that, and to the story..."

The genesis of the story, it seems to me, lay in Clarke moving off to uni, leaving the family behind, and things unsaid. A time of great torments.

"It is. It definitely started there," she answers simply, explaining what is clearly an outpouring of emotion, a cathartic experience.

"I guess the whole thing to going off to uni like that was a voyage of discovery. I wanted to fall in love, be checking everyone out and find things out for myself."

Did it seem like getting away?

"That's what it seemed to come out as, that's the central theme of the story, because there's this thing that I didn't want to confront. I love my brother Julian very much, so there's some lighthearted aspects to the play, but it really is a journey of discovery for me as much as anything. 'Unspoken' is very serious and determined, but I really should say it's not all so deep. Not all of it."

Alex Wheaton

'Unspoken' opens on Wed 5 July for Vitalstatistix at the Waterside Theatre, Port Adelaide