While being a quintessentially American play, Steel Magnolias has always had production success in Australia. Nicole Kidman made her professional stage debut in the first Australian production in 1988 and even audiences in far north Queensland, who may have found the Louisiana parish familiar, got to experience the show. The title suggests the female characters are as delicate as magnolias but as tough as steel and while that binary is clearly outdated, Ali Bendall’s production is lively, hilarious, and captures a lost time in all its nooks and crannies.
The Genesian Theatre is inside a redone Catholic church. The red seats and shiny red curtain matched the 80s soundtrack the audience was treated to. Alongside the Church’s stained glass windows depicting Emperor Nero’s second wife Poppaea, the theatre had a classic yet magical atmosphere. Once home to legends like Baz Luhrmann and John Bell, you could feel the theatrical history around you.
Set between April 1984 and November 1986, the illustration of and commentary on Southern culture is essential to the play. The mention of Bisquick pancake mix alongside the constant talk of the state football team and the absurd proximity of guns inside and outside the hair salon get easy laughs from an Australian audience. Behind the standard taglines is an understanding of how parochial the South was, even in the 80s. The former Mayor’s wife Clairee (Sharron Olivier) is obsessed with family names and also owns the local radio station. The hair salon is essentially a gossip club where the owner Truvy (Molly Haddon) says “anyone who is anyone gets their hair done.” While politics is never explicitly discussed, the throwaway line about Clairee’s late husband, “he was a Louisiana politician, we don’t know many who went to heaven,” is telling. A Washington Post review of the 2012 movie adaption starring Julia Roberts and Dolly Parton that says it was “more Hollywood than the South,” does not reflect this production.
Like any Southern story, tensions over religion are a feature. The 80s saw the rise of televangelism and the prosperity gospel and those forces found a way to invade the salon. The local Reverend sues the football team for being called “The Devils” and Truvy’s assistant Annelle (Julia Grace) is born again as a Baptist. Truvy and the others think they are “a little too praise-the-lord,” but Annelle starts trying to convert the others on stage anyway. While entertaining, her act at points detracts from an interesting initial character arc. The backstory of her husband leaving which forces her to move into town is never resolved. Even though the original author argues none are meant to be caricatures, this character, in a sense, becomes one.
The set itself evolves to reflect how fast paced this decade was with a booming consumer culture. The hairstyles and the posters on the wall change every year a radio appears inside the salon halfway through the play. Set changes become disco dance breaks. For some, the country is rushing past them. Truvy constantly obsesses over the other women’s love lives while her husband “lives on the couch.” She is the only character never to leave or enter the Salon doors. While the wider world enters, she never takes part in it like the other characters. When M’Lynn (Georgia Britt) makes a joke that a 30th anniversary symbolises Valium, she laughs less than the others.
Most of the characters, however, experience massive changes. The old curmudgeon Ouiser (Sandra Bass), who is unmarried, lives alone, and dresses in grey costumes with relatively short and simple hair finds new love after calling men “horrible creatures,” earlier in the play. Even though she may seem like a stereotypical “crazy old lady”, who gets into fights with her neighbours, the audience comes to realise she is happy being independent because she maintains strict boundaries even when she has a relationship again. An unmarried woman at her age can be something other than just bitter — a representation not seen in much 20th-century media.
The performance of the night went to Shelby (Heather Tleige). While Truvy jokes that in the 80s, “if you can achieve puberty you can achieve a past,” Shelby is most excited about her future. Blush and bashful like her favourite colours, she dreams of family life, grandkids, and “getting old with someone,” but also wants to live in ways her mother and older Southern women never could. She wants a honeymoon in Las Vegas and always asks Truvy for the newest styles. Her diabetes takes almost all of that away. A pregnancy she was told she could not have leads to kidney failure. The transplant from her mother M’Lynn was not enough to save her. It’s hard to ignore the implication that the doctor’s ignorance of how birth control interacted with her diabetes played a part in her death.
The play’s unexpected dark turn reminds the audience how important public social spaces like the hair salon are. The gossip and zingers are sharp throughout but when Shelby dies, her mother can’t quite leave the shop. She stands at the doorway multiple times but has to hear another joke or story. As Bendall points out, it is often “the normality of friendship” that keeps us going.
Steel Magnolias is showing at the Genesian Theatre until 16 December.
