A play that visits dark places
Danielle Cormack tells Alex Behan how she’s struggled to stage a play about people’s struggles with mental health.
Danielle Cormack calls me back the day after our interview. After a raw 45-minute conversation covering a range of difficult topics, I presume she’s going to ask me to leave out some of the more personal stuff.
Wrong. She wants to make sure of just one thing.
‘‘I just wanted to reiterate that mental health is a deeply complex area and I don’t want to seem cavalier. It’s not black and white. I don’t profess to be a guru around mental health, I’m not. I’m just working on a play.’’
The truth is, like many people this year, Danielle Cormack is struggling. She’s not complaining, far from it, she just thinks it’s important to be real about it.
‘‘It’s OK to not be great 100 per cent of the time. I feel like I live in a very privileged place in the world for various reasons but mental health doesn’t discriminate. I’ve certainly had moments where I haven’t felt that great. At all.’’
Well known from early roles on Gloss and Shortland Street and recent outings like Wentworth and Jack Irish, Cormack is one of our most accomplished actors in both theatre and television.
Decades deep in her career, I ask how life as an actor compares with her dreams of being an actor.
‘‘I never remember thinking ‘I want to be an actor’; I just always was. I was always in a theatre company or doing a play somewhere. I love the idea of performance so much, the investigation of humanity and human beings. How we are socially and our interior world. It’s just fascinating to me’’.
If her desire to act came from a love of craft rather than a desire to be well liked, fame then came as a challenging prospect.
‘‘It was really peculiar. I fought it for a very long time and it was one of the reasons I left Shortland Street early. I just found the idea of being known in public a little overwhelming.
‘‘Even the opportunity to go work in the States in my mid-20s, I resisted that. Which I don’t understand now. I should have taken the opportunity when I had it. I look at that now and I feel quite differently. I don’t regret it. It’s just how I was at the time’’.
At the time, there wasn’t a lot of hope in an acting career. Instead there was ‘‘a lot of messaging about how it wasn’t a viable career. You always needed a backstop’’. She didn’t. I could mention how hardworking and prolific she is but her IMDB page does the heavy lifting for me. For every television show you’ve seen her in there are five you haven’t and her theatre appearances are as long as her screen credits. Then a while back she saw a play. ‘‘I was really affected by the writing and the messages. That it could approach a topic so fragile with equal parts, gravity and levity. It’s a really funny piece of theatre which is kind of at odds with the topic’’.
She knew she wanted to direct it for a New Zealand audience. ‘‘It’s so effective and moving and everything theatre should be.’’
Every Brilliant Thing is about depression, grief, loss and the most pernicious of subjects, suicide.
Around the same time Cormack was in conversation with fellow Aotearoa actor Robbie Magasiva, whose brother Pua died by suicide in 2019. ‘‘He’d been expressing his interest in raising awareness around suicide and suicide prevention especially in
New Zealand. I very gingerly approached him to see whether he would be interested in performing it and he gave a resounding yes.’’
With two such names attached, Silo Theatre jumped on board for an Auckland run and two special performances at Te Tairawhiti Festival. Then came 2020.
Magasiva couldn’t get out of Melbourne due to lockdowns and TV commitments and Cormack has found herself directing the play from Sydney via Zoom.
‘‘We’ve gone through so many obstacles which have had an impact on the work itself. Sometimes it’s happiness and ease and sometimes it’s this tsunami of problems and obstacles, and how do you cope with that? Ironically, that’s what this play is about.’’
So we’re talking about struggling to put on a play about struggling in a year when everyone is struggling.
We speak about how lockdowns played on some of our worst social instincts.
‘‘There’s this whole other element now in our society of social annexes where we are exposed to this comparison lifestyle. ‘Oh, I should be more productive. I should be this; I should be that’.
‘‘It’s creating a huge amount of pressure and what chance do you think you have if you’re stuck in a place where you can’t even get out of bed?
‘‘We all have the power to click off. Stop doing anything that heightens your anxiety. Anything that makes you feel less than. But, yeah, Covid was shit It was shit. It still is. Life keeps coming at you.
‘‘Adversities, death. Death of relationships. Death in the family. Or you’ve been laid off work or you can’t find work and this place of uncertainty and hopelessness that Covid has presented creates a whole other level of anxiety.’’ Sometimes cultural or gendered influences can prohibit people reaching
out. helping to change. ‘‘How do we educate our future that to sit and talk about your feelings is a completely normal thing to do?
‘‘You go to the gym, you work on your body and service your car but you live with your thoughts and feelings 24/7 and if they’re operating in a way that’s making you feel really broken wouldn’t you want to invest in helping fix that? Or at least try to understand it’’?
Covid aside, directing a play via Zoom aside, how has Danielle Cormack’s 2020 been? She doesn’t mince words.
‘‘F...... horrible. There’s been a lot that’s happened in my personal life which I’ve really struggled with.
‘‘At the same time, it’s really invited me to really address where I’m at right now.
‘‘To really dig deep and think about the changes that I want to make and where I want to head from this point on. But there’s been a lot of endings. A lot of loss.
‘‘Like I say everyone still has life coming at them. I’m acutely aware that everyone has their ups and downs but personally yeah it’s not been great.’’
We talk about coping.
For her it’s keeping things simple.
‘‘If I’m having a moment, just concentrating back into the breath. Breathing. Getting out into nature and looking at leaves on the trees.
‘‘Because a lot of time it’s too much rumination and not understanding that our thoughts are not necessarily who we are.
‘‘Just really trying to stay present, as present as you can. A lot of the time I’ll be thinking about something that’s already happened or projecting things into the future that haven’t happened.
‘‘Those two states create huge amounts of anxiety. So I think for me that’s the space that I’ve been sitting in. A very anxious space.’’
She’s been reaching out to friends, feels very grateful to have a support network but is quick to point out she doesn’t have all the answers.
‘‘I know that mental health, anxiety and depression happen in all different levels. For some people it’s acute and I can’t speak to all experiences I can only talk about what has worked for me.’’
Cormack hopes Every Brilliant Thing will resonate with audiences and perhaps even help a person or two.
‘‘It’s about educating your family and friends maybe even someone you don’t know who you think might be struggling and giving them language and skills to approach that.
‘‘We have all at some point known someone going through this or had our own experience. I don’t think it matters what age you are, what gender or how you identify or what ethnicity you are, there will be something in this play that you can relate to. To be able to stage a show that speaks so universally is really exciting. Never more so than right now.’’
‘‘We all have the power to click off. Stop doing anything that heightens your anxiety.’’
Danielle Cormack, above