If criticism were simply a matter of ticking boxes, it might be safely assumed that I would hate The Year of Magical Thinking. It's a 90-minute monologue adapted by Joan Didion from her book of the same name, in which she recounted what happened after the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, during the ultimately fatal illness of their only daughter, Quintana. Didion's book was finished before her daughter died, 20 months after Dunne, but the second death is folded into the play.


The play narrates Didion's devastating experience of grief and the beginnings of her acceptance of the deaths of those whom she most loved. Put like that, it sounds straightforwardly bathetic. Superficially, this show appears to have the voyeuristic attraction of the misery memoir, prinked with a blush of aspirational privilege (Didion is the very image of the privileged American, a cultural aristocrat). Worse still, it's underlined by autobiographical facticity, pulling on an authenticity which is, most often, hostile to the more elusive authenticity of art.

It could be the worst kind of middle-brow theatre, the placatory event which opens a wound only to declare that a band-aid is sufficient to erase it entirely. What prevents this is two coruscating artistic intelligences, Joan Didion and Robyn Nevin, whose work is framed by a non-invasive, minimal production directed by Cate Blanchett.

The show begins with Didion reporting the death of her husband from a massive heart attack, three months before their 40th anniversary. She speaks with a sceptical, ironic accuracy that heightens the numbed denial that is the subject of the play: the "magical thinking" that makes her refuse to throw out his shoes, because he will need them when he returns. Gradually she also reveals the dangerous illness of her daughter. The text jumps neurotically from scalpel-sharp details of the appalling present into the "safe" past, a past which at the same time Didion seeks to avoid because it is annihilatingly painful to remember.

The journey from borderline insanity to difficult acceptance is mercifully free of affirming statements: Didion is far too honest and exacting to cheat. The denial she describes is a wholly human inability to cope with pain; here she scales the grim topologies of the grief Gerard Manley Hopkins describes in his poem:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief
More pangs will, schooled as forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? ....

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

Didion's is a prosaic expression of this pain, athough she often calls on poetry (Auden, for example, in a beautifully elliptical allusion to Musee des Beaux Arts in which she speaks of the ordinary details that surround disaster: "The clear blue sky from which the plane fell. The swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.") She desires, with the passion for truthfulness which is the real mark of intellectual energy, to describe grief as it is: "Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself."

Didion is enough of a writer - which is, as Robert Frost once confessed, a cold vocation - to be able to take such deeply personal anguish and shape it into art. This is much rarer than our confessional culture will admit, requiring an almost inhumanly cool attention that at the same time admits the raw reality of feeling: the icy hammer, if you like, on the molten metal. The difference between this activity and what's called "self-expression" is like the difference between the shaped energy of a Giacometti sculpture and, say, a pile of guts on a butcher's block.

Which isn't to say that The Year of Magical Thinking is a great piece of drama. It isn't: mostly it remains great prose, an art closer to the patient, cumulative detail of weaving than it is to the sculptural dynamic of dramatic writing. But it still makes a compelling monologue that is wrenchingly moving, yet shot through with a profoundly literate and mischievous intelligence.

I suspect that Robyn Nevin is perfectly cast in this role: like Didion, she is a flawless and meticulous technician, able to modulate with superb subtlety and nuance the fluid, destabilising tensions between sceptical, investigating intelligence and shattering feeling that animates the text. If she doesn't quite scale the heights of her terrifying performance in The Women of Troy, she isn't far behind in this role. It was a grand day for Australian theatre when Nevin decided to return to the stage.

Alice Babidge's set is minimal: black cavernous walls on two sides of the Fairfax, and on the floor rows and rows of black chairs. Nevin is revealed seated mid-stage at the beginning, and moves from chair to chair, intimately close to the audience and then lost in distance, her monologue punctuated by Nick Schlieper's impeccable lighting and Natasha Anderson's sound design. I felt occasionally that the sound design lacked the nuance of the other aspects of the production, that there was perhaps the odd crudity in the direction; but for all that, what counts in this show are the text and the performance, and they shine.

However leavened by Didion's wit, The Year of Magical Thinking is an emotionally gruelling and demanding play. It's certainly not for everyone: the man next to me was almost catatonic with boredom, squirming and fiddling in his chair to the point where I was tempted to deck him, and clapped very reluctantly. Indeed, after a few conversations, I began to wonder if there is something in this show that appeals especially to women: the toughness and intellect in it is so specifically feminine, perhaps, in its unsparing relationship to feeling. But that's very wobbly territory, and I won't go there; certainly my speculations emerge from some unscientific research. But if you're interested in brilliant acting, and what bourgeois theatre can look like when it's very good indeed, go see it.

Picture: Robyn Nevin in The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, directed by Cate Blanchett. Set designed by Alice Babidge, costume by Giogrio Armani, lighting design by Nick Schlieper, composer/sound design by Natasha Anderson. With Robyn Nevin. Sydney Theatre Company presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company, Fairfax Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, until April 11.