Opinion article by Denis Harold
Published in the Otago Daily Times (17 September 2013)
The article:
Patrick Evans’
play Gifted that opened at the Fortune Theatre on Saturday suffers from a
significant ethical problem. Though the play is fiction, with all the dialogue
and most of the events having never happened in reality, yet the three
characters are given the names of real historical people. The result of Evans’
deliberate distortion in his play of the facts of these peoples’ lives is, in my
opinion, a travesty, especially given that Janet Frame died less than ten years
ago.
The artistic director of the Fortune Theatre, Lara Macgregor, claims that in
Evans’ play, ‘There’s nothing but beauty and poetry and a huge love, an amazing
use of language’, in an article in the Otago Daily Times (Thursday,
September 5). She goes on to state that, ‘What’s imagined and what’s not is so
blurred and melded together’, while Conrad Newport, the play’s director,
reinforces her admission that Gifted is not factual by stating that, ‘The
truth is bent for dramatic purposes’. If therefore the play is not true, why had
the actors, according to Macgregor, ‘studied videos of their characters to be
more truthful in their portrayals’? Macgregor and Newport are sending a mixed
message.
Janet Frame was a well-known New Zealand author and winner of the country’s most
prestigious literary prize when she went to stay at the property of Frank
Sargeson, who knew of her incarceration in mental hospitals, an experience that
she made no attempt to hide from him or anyone else. Evans deliberately changes
these facts: the character he gives the name ‘Janet Frame’ has no reputation as
a writer, and the character given the name ‘Frank Sargeson’ does not know of her
past history. Many other facts about Frame’s life and character are similarly
falsified. Evans creates an imaginary character who primarily engages with
reality through bizarre word games akin to cryptic crosswords. This is untrue,
and an insult to a woman who was self-directed, ambitious and honest.
After attending performances of the play recently in Christchurch and New
Plymouth, some theatregoers and reviewers have claimed, though admitting they
knew little of Sargeson and Frame, that they found the play ‘convincing’. But
what convinced them was a self-contained spectacle. The Fortune Theatre has
created an advertising campaign that presents a fragmented image of a young
woman, girlish in short white socks and with her legs slightly apart, posed in
front of a hedge that has a partially oval opening in it. This depersonalised
and sexualised imagery is disquieting, and a clue to Evans’ attitude to Frame
that is apparent in other of his writings. The real Janet Frame was 31 years old
at the time this play is set in, intellectually mature and courageous, having
triumphed over almost five years of institutional misdiagnosis and abuse – not a
girl.
Next to the Fortune Theatre’s promotional image for the play are words in
quotation marks: ‘Don’t try to change me – I won’t be changed’, followed by the
name ‘Janet Frame’. This is a fake quote: Frame never said these words. Evans,
who claims some expertise on Frame’s work and life, would know this. This quote
should be followed by the name ‘Patrick Evans’.
The Theatre’s website links to recent interviews with Evans and reviews of the
play, but does not link to the interview on the Radio NZ Concert programme
Upbeat on August 19 (available online) in which Eva Radich talked at
length to Evans about his play. In reply to her question (15 minutes into the
interview) about how he interpreted Frame, Evans replied, ‘Well, ahh, we have in
our family a much loved autistic person ...’
Radich: ‘Janet of course wasn’t autistic ...’
Evans: ‘Ahh, everybody I know who is autistic is autistic and not autistic. You
deal with the person in front of you.’
Radich: ‘Janet was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia – that was certainly never an
issue.’
Evans: ‘No. But no, that was the label that we had then.’
Radich: ‘And the label we have now is autism?’
Evans: ‘It is, yes. And you take the person in front of you and you can see the
vulnerability, the difference, the extraordinary insights that people have who
are different in that way.’
These are astonishing statements by Evans, a revelation that he considered Frame
had been schizophrenic, which is a label he now believes has been replaced by
‘autistic’. This is the first time in forty years, as far as I am aware, that he
has put statements like this on the record. Under the cloak of ‘nothing but
beauty and poetry and a huge love’ audiences are being fed a ‘mad genius’ myth
that has been debunked.
There have long been indications that Evans did not accept that Frame had been
wrongly diagnosed with a mental disorder, despite a panel of world-renowned
psychiatrists in London in 1957 concluding that she had been misdiagnosed. Evans
has often purveyed a catchphrase, ‘the myth of the misdiagnosis’ in an attempt
to undermine the fact of Frame’s misdiagnosis.
Evans’ admission explains why he needed to drastically change the facts of
Frame’s life and character in Gifted: the facts do not fit his fiction.
Denis Harold is a trustee of the Janet Frame Literary Trust.
There is an excellent online commentary posted by 'The Observer' after Denis Harold's article, including these observations:
'There is a sort of "theft of spirit" involved here in which a lesser known artist uses the fame and name recognition of a famous artist to graft their own imaginative work onto, riding their coattails to a sort of automatic acceptance and appreciation of their work.'
'The practice also beggars the historical record'
'Kudos for informing the public about the distortions in "Gifted", setting the record straight as befits the duties of a literary trust.'
