With Milk and Blood Benjamin Nichol solidifies his place as one of our most pre-eminent playwrights, returning to a question that has been at the heart of his work to date: what does care in the face of violence look like?
In 2021’s Kerosene, this question prompted the already accomplished actor to examine domestic violence and the ties that bind long-term friendship. In 2022’s Sirens, he turned to the evangelical church and queerness in regional Victoria to explore the violence of internalised prejudice. With these two acclaimed solo shows, and in just three short years, Nichol has managed something most playwrights spend years trying to accomplish: he’s created a signature style.
Walk into a Nichol play and you expect a 60-minute character-driven monodrama set on an empty stage that follows the material impact of a contemporary issue – queerness, incarceration, domestic violence, class – with deep empathy and wit. There’ll be an acapella song, countless moments of dance-like movement and there’ll definitely be tears. Nichol is the naturalistic counterpoint to local legend Patricia Cornelius, sharing Cornelius’s interest in class politics but trading in her formalist tendencies for a more minimalistic social realism, forgoing her post-dramatics for earnest sentimentality.
Milk and Blood signals the halfway point for Nichol’s planned eight-part anthology series of one-person shows. Together, they offer a two-hour showcase of these Nichols-ian tropes honed to a sharp and devastating point.
It’s a double bill staged in the spacious fortyfivedownstairs. The first half, Milk, follows Mummy (Brigid Gallacher): a teen mum and doe-eyed optimist gripping ever tighter to silver linings as she reflects on motherhood following the incarceration of her son, Boy. The second, Blood, follows Daddy (Charles Purcell), a long-time sex worker and expert in BDSM who, after being attacked walking home by a group of teenagers, reflects on his understanding of power and masculinity.
Milk, the stronger of the pair, could be on any one of our main stages tomorrow. Nichol has always shown an impressive attention to detail, but it is even more finely tuned here. Mummy’s world – whether at her job in disability support, caring for her younger son, Doug; or visiting Boy every Sunday – is beautifully evoked with simple details rich in deep personal meaning. The attention Nichol gives to her new floral dress, a choir practice, or her love of John Farnham’s ‘Two Strong Hearts’ makes her feel strikingly real and relatable.
But these details would be nothing without Gallacher, who pierces the heart with her performance. With the simplicity of a raised brow, she is idealistic and loving; with the subtle flash of her eyes she is conflicted and reflective. “Love takes strength”, she repeats throughout the show, a conviction we watch be constantly tested until her slumped posture and tired eyes at the show’s end offer a damning final glimpse of the burden of care so often shouldered by our mothers.
Meanwhile, quick-fire lighting transitions from Harrie Hogan help signpost her movements between various supporting characters, and piano-heavy underscoring from Connor Ross adds a little more drama to every devastating emotional beat.
What distinguishes Milk is that it feels firmly anchored in questions of motherhood at all times. Nichol has Gallacher reflect on her identity as a mother explicitly throughout, whether during memories of her violent son or conversations with other mothers. Every scene or detail introduces new perspectives on what we expect from our mums and why.
Blood feels less surefooted. It’s still rich in detail and impressively designed, with Ross switching out piano trills for toe-tapping eighties synth and Hogan’s complex lighting moving with the elegance and speed of a choreographed dance. As Daddy, Purcell mostly strikes the perfect balance between bravado and vulnerability, flipping subtly between the two with a peacocking strut or trembling lip. But thematically the piece is unfocused.
The problem lies in Blood’s side characters. Where Milk saw Gallacher flip between characters as a way to introduce new perspectives on its themes, Blood’s supporting personas mostly appear as caricatures. There’s Jaimie, the queening Tarot card reader; Pup, the twenty-something trying his hand at sex work; and Claire, the loveable narcissist. While Purcell’s vocalisations for these characters are impressive and often funny, they are underwritten compared to the characters we find in Milk and played too often as bits rather than to help complement any particular theme. The effect is that the questions asked by the show become increasingly harder to follow, muddying Daddy’s character arc. Putting the shows back-to-back only emphasises this difference, leaving one-half of the night wanting.
Still, what the pairing shows is a playwright going from strength to strength. I can only hope one of our main stages throws Nichol a blank cheque so he can take any one of the characters he’s so lovingly created and give them the space they need to breathe, dance, or belt John Farnham.
Milk and Blood plays at fortyfivedownstairs until September 1. Tickets start from $35 and are available at the venue website.
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