Jigsaws was first performed at the Hole in the Wall theatre in Perth in 1988. It was published by Currency Press in the same year. A season at La Boite Theatre, Brisbane, followed in January-February 1990. See the plot outline and photo of performers at <archive.laboite.com.au/1990/jigsaws> . Jigsaws was revived at the Koorliny Arts Centre, Kwinana, WA, February 12 – 27, 2013. All the characters are women–a rarity in the traditional theatre and a feminist statement in itself.
A Funny Realist Play
Jigsaws is similar to Doreen Clarke’s work in its realist method, but addresses feminist issues with a less brutal realism than those productions of the 70s. In Roses in Due Season, and in Clarke’s other play in the same volume, Bleedin’ Butterflies, humour is of the “deck of the Titanic” kind. Life is so tragic, so threatening, and such compromises have to be made to preserve oneself and one’s children, that humour becomes a defence, a last-resort evasion of a reality too terrible for words. This is especially true of Bleedin’ Butterflies. In Jigsaws by contrast, humour is expansive, deriving its energy from powerful and often positive relationships among the five female characters. The feminist issues addressed in Jigsaws are less obviously matters of life and death.
Middle-Class Australian Women
A fundamental difference From Clarke’s work is that Roses in Due Season and Bleedin’ Butterflies deal with working class characters and situations. The issue of physical and economic survival is always present. By contrast Jigsaws is a play about middle-class Australia. Clarke’s work is particularly to be valued for its rare depiction of working class women, their sufferings and triumphs. It’s important that feminist awareness isn’t confined to the middle class. On the other hand, it may well be true that working class women are already applying feminist principles, but without the luxuries of middle-class “naming” and ways of articulation. Jigsaws, however, deals with middle-class issues, and reflects the interests of its largely middle class audiences.
Fighting Greyness, Finding Colour
The central metaphor, the jigsaw, is introduced in the opening scene, when Pat is trying without much success to “get it all together”. Her description on p. 2 has a metaphorical significance:
ALEX: [studying the jigsaw] You could do the roof.
PAT: Any fool could do the roof. But there’s nowhere to put the roof, except on the top of the wall and I haven’t done the wall because the wall is the same boring colour as the street and the sky and the fence and the sea. What sadistic bastard invented these things anyway?
The grey world described is the colour of Pat’s depressed mood. The remainder of the play follows Alex and her sister Monica, Pat and her sister Sylvia, and their mother, Emma, as they set out to solve the jigsaws that are their lives. They look for patterns in lives threatened by chaos, or (worse) controlled by others, usually men. They battle the threatening greyness of depression and despair. They struggle to find or to preserve worlds of light and colour, of energy and liveliness. When the play ends, all the women characters have made progress towards controlling their life patterns. All have claimed patches of light and colour that exclude the threatening greyness and indeterminacy of depression and dependency.
The fulcrum on which Jigsaws oscillates is the mother-daughter pair, Sylvia and Alex. These two represent opposite poles of feminist consciousness, comparable in some ways to the contrast between Lil and Dawn in Roses in Due Season. Sylvia has conformed to patriarchal expectations for most of her life, and for most of the play she functions as a representative of patriarchy, an anti-feminist villain. Out of greed and an obsession with tidiness, with tidying away uncomfortable truths like old age, she is determined in the beginning to move her mother, Emma, into a nursing home. She cannot accept Alex’s non-conformist lifestyle. Sylvia is an advocate of women’s responsibility to others, of preparing hot meals and keeping the house clean. She thinks that her sister, Pat, should not leave her husband, Ken, because Ken will not be able to look after himself. A typical Sylvia speech about marital responsibility occurs on p. 22:
Marriage isn’t some kind of summer fun fair with a merry-go-round and a ferris wheel and coloured lights all the time. It’s routine. That’s what it is. Do you think I don’t get bored? Do you think Ian doesn’t get bored? But we manage.
This is an important speech thematically. The greyness of Pat’s jigsaw puzzle symbolises the boring, limited existence of marital routines, which sometimes trade variety and interest and danger for security. Ultimately, Jigsaws advocates the delights and thrills of risk-taking; it’s in favour of open-endedness as opposed to the deadness of closure and of happy-ever-after fairy- tale endings.
Pat’s description of her marriage, preceding on the same page, incorporates the same opposed metaphors, of greyness and colour:
I think if it had been more miserable, it might have been happier. There was no light, no colour, no flashes of fire, just a great, grey, boring dullness. Like a very long, grey, concrete tunnel. An empty, predictable sameness, day after day after day. That’s what I’m leaving. The monotony. It was so bloody boring. It was so bloody pointless. (22)
This speech, like many others in Jigsaws, is one in which some women in the audience will recognise their own experience. The immediacy of experience in late twentieth-century Australian feminist theatre is well exemplified in this speech.
Putting the Pieces Together
The piece in the jigsaw of her life which Sylvia gets into place during the play is a very important piece in anyone’s life: it’s a heightened awareness of her own feelings. This first manifests at the end of Act 2, scene 1, when Sylvia admits the trauma that the unemployment of her husband, Ian, is causing her (46). At the end of Jigsaws, when she contacts Alex’s lover, Diana, Sylvia has realised how much she loves her daughter, and this is manifested in their embrace. However conflict soon reopens over Sylvia’s projected visit to Melbourne, where Alex and Diana are living. This is the note on which the play ends.
The positive movement of Jigsaws, in which all of the female characters find the courage to take risks and grow, is nevertheless represented in the opening and closing scenes.
The play opens at the end of a year, in the aftermath of Christmas. The feeling of over-fullness, of torpor and excessive heat, and (for women) exhaustion after a flood of preparations, child care and cooking, is well known to Australians. Gwen Harwood’s “Suburban Sonnet: Boxing Day”, p. 101 in Hampton and Llewellyn anthology, The Penguin Book of Australian Women’s Poetry, vividly evokes this mood. Post-Christmas in Jigsaws, something is ending–represented by Aunt Nellie’s death–and the new thing has not yet begun.
Jigsaws closes, however, at the opposite point, the moment when the new thing–the new year–is beginning. Announced at the striking of the midnight clock, the new thing is Alex’s telling Diana that she loves her: their reconciliation is complete. As the strains of Auld Lang Syne come to an end, Alex and Sylvia also embrace in wishes for the New Year. At this point symbolic salutations are being exchanged between the strong but conventional woman of the past, and the free young woman of the future. Jigsaws makes an interesting contribution to the important theme of mother and daughter relationships, seen in other plays which we have studied in the course.
Five Women Looking Forward
All five women characters make progress towards completing the jigsaw patterns of their lives.
Alex is the vehicle for many of Jigsaws‘ ideas. More than any other character, she represents the brave, open-ended, anti-monotony, risk-taking approach to life which the play advocates. This has been her attitude from childhood, when she ran away from home four times, broke her arm twice, and charged other children for a look at the stitches when she fell off her bike (33). Through Alex Jigsaws confronts audiences with a lesbian relationship and challenges conventional 1980s and earlier judgments about female homosexuality. The major piece that Alex fits into the jigsaw of her life during the play is a greater stability in relationship. This means commitment, despite any drawbacks, to the person you are in love with. This piece falls into place as the clock strikes twelve, and the New Year with all its challenges and opportunities begins.
Progress is most obvious in the case of Emma, the mother of Sylvia and Pat, who transitions from suicidal despair into a new relationship, and sets out on a caravan tour of Australia. It’s typical of the play that Emma does not plan to marry her new companion, Tom, but to “have a wild affair” (65). She has an optimistic speech about new beginnings on p. 57.
Pat, too, breaks away from her unfulfilling marriage, and begins a series of affairs with a selection of young men.
Sylvia (as I argued above) has gained self-knowledge. Perhaps she has learned that she doesn’t have to accept mediocrity in life or in love.
Monica does not take positive action to improve her situation during the play, but the signs of instability are encouraging. Examples are her discussion about university study (50-51), and her anger when she discovers yet another instance of her husband, Nick’s, infidelity (63-64). Perhaps in the future Monica will conquer her indecisiveness, and give up seeking release of anger by beating up the garden gnomes (64).
Positives and Negatives
The main gift that Jigsaws offers to women in the audience, of all ages, from the twenties to the seventies, is a message of hope. Feminism is embodied in the notable exclusion of male characters from the stage. Yet dialogue tells us a great deal about Pat’s husband Ken; Sylvia’s husband Ian; Monica’s husband Nick; and Emma’s relationship to Dad and Tom. On the whole the image of men in Jigsaws is not appealing, and the play suggests that women should be cautious in their relationships with men. The description of the garden gnomes, as well as their fate (64), is significant.
A negative criticism of Jigsaws might be that, despite its commitment to open-endedness, it tends to reduce the world to black-and-white. Women’s relationships are rich and interesting, and promise ever greater rewards, while relations between the sexes, especially institutionalised ones like marriage, are looked at askance. However, this simplicity has the advantage of immediacy and directness in communicating the message, a quality that is at a premium in theatrical performance. After an interval of thirty-odd years, Jigsaws like Roses in Due Season, still speaks directly to the experience of Australian women.