And I’ll Give You All the Diamonds in My Teeth
by Jeanne Mazure
South Australian Writers’ Theatre
Red Shed

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

By coincidence we have recently had two new plays about the life of the mentally ill. But where Louis Nowra’s Cosi settled for comic exoticism, in And I’ll Give You All the Diamonds in My Teeth, South Australian writer Jeanne Mazure has delved deeper. A practising psychologist herself, Mazure has had a long association with her subject although her approach is anything but clinical. Paradoxically this is not always a strength in her work because instead of creating a chilling sparseness her writing is often burdened by a kind of slurpy lyricism.

Diamonds (let’s keep the title manageable) is about a group of chronic patients from what is known as the “back-blocks” of a present-day psychiatric institution. In some recognition that this is the late 20th century they have been moved to a more self-sufficient living unit where these six damaged souls live together as a surrogate family, supporting, bickering, sulking, voguing and generally emerging from their thin shells. Their troubled histories unfold – Ellie is catatonic after stabbing a man, Jack “presents well” but is a convicted rapist, Raphael has never recovered from the death of his son, Tokay blames himself for his sister’s suicide, Marlene lives in a fog of old movies and Claudia searches in the looking glass for her dead twin.

Jeanne Mazure weaves these narratives together revealing not only the very real difficulties of the characters but their buried sensibilities and gifts. The play confirms the view that such therapy units work and patients make astonishing progress- so when funding and resources are withdrawn it amounts to institutionalised brutality. But this remains mere abstraction because despite sincere performances and deft direction from Joh Hartog the play’s range is too familiar. The notion of the psychiatrically ill as romantic, poetic figures is a
commonplace from Kesey to Laing and Szasz. There may be plenty of truth in this commonplace but Diamonds has not found sufficiently vivid facets to intensify and enlarge our understanding.

Nevertheless this is a worthwhile production. Director Joh Hartog has used the Red Shed space shrewdly. His thrifty set and astute lighting give the narrative and performances such focus and fluency that the text frequently becomes superfluous. When the actors are eloquently physical there is no need for Raphael to say -“Music is healing. The sadness flows away” because Barry Becker’s shyly vulnerable performance has already said as much. Don Chapman as the hypermanic Tokay could also be spared some portentous lines but his is a strong performance all the same. Kate Fryer is memorable as Ellie, as is Susie Fraser as Claudia, emerging from the depths- expressed via messages on the word processor. Like Tokay’s whiteboard, this objective correlative is one of Mazure’s best devices. Nick Skibinski has an edgy clarity as Jack, Annilisa Hope does well with the sometimes over-written excesses of Marlene and Amanda Finnis provides a valuable consistency as the nurse, Maris.

This production like last year’s Suns of Home is continuing proof of the tenacity of the South Australian Writers’ Theatre. And I’ll Give You All the Diamonds in My Teeth is an honest piece – but it needs trimming and compression to engage us more urgently with the characters and their plight. Perhaps with fewer diamonds and more teeth it would make us as ashamed of our treatment of the mentally ill as we ought to be.

The Adelaide Review, No. 118, September, 1993, p.43.