On the opening night of Mark Colvin’s Kidney – in a tense, funny scene played out between two key characters, protagonist Mary-Ellen Field and the model Elle Macpherson – the performance was stopped. Surtitles flashed up on stage weren’t working. The director, David Berthold, calling out from the audience, asked for a reboot.
The interruption is significant, not least because this is a play about technology. Closely following real-life events, Mark Colvin’s Kidney addresses how new forms of communication helped to destroy one person’s life and to save another’s. Along the way there is tenderness, betrayal, confusion and a fair amount of laugh-out-loud humour, mostly aimed at an older generation’s attempts to navigate social media.
Mary-Ellen Field, an Australian living in London, is acting as Elle Macpherson’s business adviser. When sensitive information is leaked to the press, Macpherson points the finger at Field, who loses her job and (nearly) her sanity when she is wheeled off to rehab at her client’s insistence. Only later it is revealed that Field blames the leak on News of the World phone hacking.
(In real life, Macpherson has never spoken about these events. Her lawyers have said previously she did not terminate her business relationship with Field because she believed Field had leaked stories to the press, although no other reason has been given. Although Field sued News International, she eventually withdrew her claim and had to pay News’s costs.)
Cue national Australian treasure and broadcaster Mark Colvin who contacts Field from the other side of the world – on Twitter, no less – to ask her for an interview as she takes on the Murdoch empire in court. An affectionate friendship forms, shielded by the blissful anonymity of never actually having met. When Colvin falls seriously ill, Field offers him a kidney.
Acclaimed playwright Tommy Murphy (of Holding the Man fame) based his new work on extensive interviews with both Colvin and Field. In the program, he recalls asking the latter, “So tell me, how did this go from a tweet to an organ donation?” That question forms the dramatic tension at the heart of the play. But, like the shaky start, it gets lost somehow in a story where dated-looking technology on stage, rather than an asset, becomes a stumbling block.
Murphy’s problem is significant: how to develop a relationship between two characters that only meet in person towards the end? He solves this by having the pair “talk” through emails, tweets, and SMS as if casually chatting to each other. Surtitles – announcing things such as “These are actual text messages between Mary-Ellen Field and Mark Colvin” – clarify where and how these conversations are taking place. There’s even a gory projection of Field’s actual kidney in Colvin’s body that one sends to the other.
At times this is used to comic effect. Midway through, Field dives into a confessional box in a French Catholic church to take a call from her lawyer, only to be reprimanded. We are told drolly: “This encounter with a priest never happened.” Events that did happen also lend bittersweet laughs; someone, for example, sets up the Twitter account @ColvinsKidney when Colvin is in hospital.
Peirse inhabits Field as a gauche, awkward contradiction: a woman in a loving marriage who desires a platonic soulmate; a member of the Conservative party whose faith in British institutions starts to waver; a tactless blunderer with a big heart. Her rapport with modern-day pen pal Colvin (the utterly convincing John Howard who staggers, sweaty and sick, on his walking stick) is sweetly old-fashioned. Helen Thomson, playing leggy, pouty Elle Macpherson, adds a splash of celebrity glamour.
Despite these strong performances, and a storyline that you couldn’t make up, Mark Colvin’s Kidney never quite satisfies. The form of the play – the central space technology takes, and dictates – creates a framework that is jumpy and unfocused, making some moments (the father-son scenes are particularly cringe-making) oddly empty. Too many strands are started then stopped, leaving none explored to their full emotional or intellectual depth.
Watching, I couldn’t help wonder, was this a work about the horrors of phone hacking? The failure of the British justice system? The privilege of celebrity? The mental pressures of rehab? The ethics of organ donation? Each and every thread – if properly interrogated – could stand alone as a powerful, pressing narrative. Crammed together in the one play they served, only, to make Mark Colvin’s Kidney feel swamped.
