Mother at the Q is Noni Hazlehurst's one-woman triumph

Daniel Keene's intensely moving and profoundly thought-provoking play Mother has been specifically written as a one-woman show for leading Australian actor Noni Hazlehurst.

What Keene has written in a few short weeks is an ode on motherhood. Superbly crafted, not as a poem, but as a poetic monologue, lyrical in tone, intense in emotion and deeply personal, Mother offers a searing insight into the desolate predicament of Christie, an elderly, homeless woman, forlorn, forsaken and cast out to survive in the lonely lanes of Melbourne .

Hazlehurst is magnificent in the role. Amidst the litter and debris of Kat Chan's set design and clothed in the worn remnants of penury, Christie emerges from the dim shadows of Tom Willis'lighting as the sounds of voracious seagulls rent the air with hungry, scavenging cries. Here in a landscape of grim misfortune, Christie relates the tragic episodes of her unfortunate life. In one episode, Keene describes the innocent love between Christie and her husband, Lenny, entwined in each other's arms and surrounded by white blossoms upon the ground. It is the loss of such innocence and the destruction of their love that makes for tragic consequences, arousing pity and fear.

Hazlehurst is too accomplished an actor to allow Christie to simply wallow in pity. Nor does Keene give voice to defeat in spite of the horrific choices and circumstances that determined Christie's life, following the birth of her son. Under Matt Scholten's astute and empathetic direction, Hazlehurst's performance reveals a woman, who may well have been the victim of post-natal depression, misunderstood by her husband, blamed by her mother for her descent into alcoholism, forced into a mental home and out onto the streets by the husband, given scant access to her baby son, humiliated, abandoned and misunderstood by family and society.

Mother is a cry for compassion, a plea for empathy and a voice for all mothers who live their lives under a veil of abuse and rejection. Keene's black humour and bitter irony, inspired by the tragic fate of Medea and the poetry of Dorothy Hewett imbues Hazlehurst's performance with inescapable truth. She bears the foul-mouthed taunts of a cruel child, the relinquishing of her precious child, the indignity of the euphemistically called rest home and the eviction from a home where love once lay in entwined arms and tender touch. In a tour de force one-woman show of a little more than an hour, Hazlehurst offers a towering glimpse of a misunderstood and grievously wronged mother, her struggle for survival, her pain, the consequences of her choices, and her cry for recognition.

Mother is confronting, at times disturbing, often heart-wrenching, and yet superbly written, brilliantly performed and sensitively directed. It offers a rare opportunity to see Hazlehurst live on stage, but even more than that, this is a play that exposes us to ourselves and asks us not to judge, but to understand. Its short season at the Q should not be missed.