THEATRE
Mother ★★★★
Arts Centre Melbourne, until September 21

The poor and the marginalised have spurred Daniel Keene’s dramatic imagination since at least the days of the critically acclaimed Keene/Taylor Theatre Project (1997-2002), which began, famously, with short plays staged inside the Brotherhood of St Laurence furniture warehouse in Fitzroy.

Written for Noni Hazlehurst, his haunting monodrama Mother returns to the poorest of the poor. It gives voice to an ageing homeless woman, Christie, as she wanders the laneways and watering-holes and liminal places of a bygone inner Melbourne.

Between Keene’s exquisitely crafted writing and Hazlehurst’s staggering performance, Mother is theatre that bores into the conscience. Unlike rough sleepers you might walk past in the street, you won’t be able to look away.

The play is far from misery porn. It’s shot through with black humour that accentuates the harrowing realities of Christie’s life – blighted by grief, mental illness, addiction, and the rejection and contempt of all (her plight is seen as so fearful she attracts even the hatred of little boys).

Keene is also unabashedly a philosopher of the stage. I feel a bit silly saying there’s a negative theology to his work. The down-and-out characters he creates do often have an existential and agnostic bent, like Samuel Beckett’s, though given what Christie has to say about Jesus, she’d doubtless think a phrase as fancy as “negative theology” was the study of what an absolute bastard God can be.

Yet it’s true. Much in Christie’s life has been smothered by the stigma and humiliation of poverty, but she has learnt to snatch blessings where she can.

In one poignant scene, she washes herself in a font of holy water at a church when no one is looking, and there’s unexpected wisdom in the “next to nothing” she admits to knowing … lessons in death, in pain, in loneliness from which she can’t afford to distract herself.