When Helen Garner arrived at Sydney’s Belvoir St theatre last Wednesday, she was worried the next two hours were “going to be gruesome”. It was opening night of the adaptation of her 2008 novel, The Spare Room, based on her experience caring for a dying friend who came to stay with her.
“They were the three worst weeks of my life, they were just unforgettably dreadful,” Garner said in conversation with Jennifer Byrne at Belvoir on Monday evening. “I came along [to opening night] feeling that I would find it unbearable to live those three weeks again.”
After the show, she crawled into bed “exhausted”. “I don’t sleep very well now, since I got old, but I got into bed and I slept without moving for nine hours,” Garner said. “Seeing those three weeks played out on stage resolved something in me.”
In The Spare Room, the narrator, Helen, gamely agrees to host her old friend Nicola when she flies from Sydney to Melbourne to attend a cancer clinic, without realising how close to death she is. As the novel opens, Helen is preparing her spare room for her friend – fresh sheets, plumped pillows, a new rug, flowers – confident in her capabilities as a hostess and carer. This is quickly punctured by Nicola’s shocking frailty and poor health, and her irrational optimism about her prognosis and the clinic’s dubious treatment protocol – which turns out to be Vitamin C injections and “ozone baths”.
There follows a power struggle: Helen’s fierce love for her friend gives way to excoriating rage at her delusional positivity and refusal to admit she’s dying, while Nicola stubbornly resists Helen’s attempts to arrange proper pain medication and palliative care.
“I was cruel to her,” Garner confessed, reflecting on her experience with her friend (Jenya Osborne, who died in 2006), adding: “When somebody’s in a trance of craziness, you want to snap them out of it – and that can make you cruel, harsh.”
Belvoir’s artistic director, Eamon Flack, who adapted the novel for stage, said it was Garner’s frank depiction of an older woman’s rage that drew him to it.
Garner said she was criticised for precisely this aspect of her novel when it was first published. “Quite a few older men criticised it because they said it was too full of anger … I was kind of shocked, actually, [because] we rage against death; there’s a lot of anger in us when death is in the room.”
These criticisms upset her, she admitted. “You don’t want to [be seen as] ‘Oh, you’re so angry.’ ‘Why are you so angry, Helen? You’re always angry’ – that’s something people [have said]. Even my grandson said this to me the other day: ‘Hel, you’re full of anger,’” she said, rearing back in mock rage: “I said, ‘How dare you!’”
Not a single woman has criticised The Spare Room for its anger, Garner said; instead, many older women thanked her for depicting the carer’s experience. One full-time carer told her: “Helen, we all feel that anger. We’re all tormented by it. Don’t be ashamed of it. It’s part of the whole thing. You have to go there.”
In Belvoir’s adaptation, Helen is portrayed by stage and screen veteran Judy Davis – a performance that Garner said she found “shattering” to watch.
“But it took me a moment to get used to it,” she said. “I don’t go to the theatre much any more. I used to go a lot – I even used to be a theatre critic in the 80s – but now I just look at movies and stuff on TV. And I’d forgotten how actory [theatre] actors are. There’s such a lot of big gestures, big movements, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, could you just stand still for a moment?’ … I kept saying ‘I would never do that. I would never run across the room like that’.”
Garner said she is not generally a fan of adaptations of her work – but neither does she feel the need to be heavily involved. “I’m happy to hand stuff over,” she said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to have anything to do with this production … I would feel that I was useless.”
One exception was Ken Cameron’s 1982 film adaptation of her 1977 novel, Monkey Grip, where she happened to be on set the day they were filming a scene between Noni Hazlehurst and Colin Friels after his character had overdosed. “He says ‘Sorry, Nora’, and in the book she says, ‘You don’t have to say that’ – and so Noni [said the line] and I said, ‘CUT! That’s so wrong. She’s in a rage.’ But they were going to play it in this soppy, wet [way],” Garner said. “I’m always glad that I was there.”
When Byrne said she would like to see all of Garner’s books adapted for stage, Garner retorted with characteristic frankness: “I’m telling you now, I would hate that. I mean, God, there’s so much shit in there.” The audience laughed appreciatively – but the author fixed us with a gimlet eye. “And when I die, don’t think anybody’s gonna get in it then, either.”
