CATHOLICS & CLOWNS IN THE CARDINAL RULES
The Cardinal Rules, a performance presented by Merrigong earlier this month, was seeded in a bouffon workshop. I hadn’t heard of such a workshop until I chatted with Rose Maher, the show's co-writer and lead performer. I asked Rose what exactly Bouffon meant and she explained it via a series of other somewhat complex historic European theatre terms. I followed what she was saying though and grasped that in her training, she’d studied clowning—proper, traditional clowning, not just clowning around at a kid’s birthday party, but the performance of it and the relationship a character holds with its audience and the masks they wear. Bouffon involves acting through the darkest mask, with the most vulnerability, and it tends to the ‘sacred and profane’. This made a lot of sense in reference to The Cardinal Rules as when I saw it I was amazed by the balance of vulnerability, humour, and real world meaning throughout it. The script was full of literal confessions, in the context of a confessional. Yet it was simultaneously full of childish play among church pews that had you laughing, at the absurdities of religion sometimes but at the nostalgic stereotypes of the Australian childhoods we all shared too: at the characters of the neighbourhood and of your best friend’s family and of the church: its kind characters and its not so kind ones.
Rose and co-writer, Alison Bennett, along with the creative team, wove some quite heavy subject matter into The Cardinal Rules, but I didn’t find myself weighed down by this. The script quite carefully reflected on taboos and tragedies that many children and adults who grew up in the church have been privy to, but it did not reject the church or aim to dissemble anyone’s faith. Rose welcomed churchgoers into her audience, and spoke of her love for so many aspects of her Catholic upbringing throughout the play, which was not autobiographic, but felt so truthful and tangibly real that this was hard to believe at first. The performance was immersive, with the furniture of the set draped in white fabrics and laces and soft lighting. It felt heavenly and welcoming, bringing you to identify with the schoolgirl Rose played, and the adult you watched her become, and the motions she went through in the process. The schoolgirl, overall, acted as a vehicle for questioning the silence the church taught Rose and teaches women, and children, and its participants. The adult reflected on the harm done by a figure in her church and looked to the child’s revelations for answers of how this could happen. The Cardinal Rules was truly entertaining. It was comedic and smart and clearly crafted with intention. Rose is a joy to watch and knows very well how to connect with her audience, alike Jane Phegan and Alison Bennett, the two women who acted alongside her. The three of them held my attention tightly and gladly and showed me an experience I hadn’t understood before. I was captivated when I first saw Rose in Coil last year, amazed by her distinct and far-reaching skill in The Cardinal Rules, and am very much looking forward seeing her again in Dolly’s Miracle Hoard alongside Alison Bennett. The two of them have very much proven themselves and any opportunity to see their work should not be passed up.
