Show captures a ‘moment in time’
Actress Morgana O’Reilly has performed her provocative solo show Stories About My Body more than 50 times since its debut last year, and she now has plans to make it into a film. She talks to Carly Gibbs about its journey, and why it’s a show men can also
When you think back to what an adolescent’s diary might have looked like in the late 1990s, Morgana O’Reilly’s isn’t it. It wasn’t a Dinky Diary or a pink, fluffy lockable diary.
It was a plain, dark-blue, leatherbound journal, possibly from Paper Plus.
It held her school-era chronicles, including those about changing bodies.
At 13, she wrote: “I really want to try to vomit after I eat because I heard if you do, you get really skinny, and I really want to be like that.”
Her innocent, sometimes “terrible” memoirs, which she wrote daily during Form 1 and 2 at Ponsonby Intermediate School, form part of her selfwritten, solo theatre show Stories About My Body, which she’s performed to sell-out crowds more than 50 times in New Zealand and Australia since April 2022, tweaking it here and there as she goes.
The 38-year-old will perform it again in three shows for the Tauranga Arts Festival from October 24-26 including a show in Waih¯ı Beach.
Following that, a “reincarnation” of it will turn it into a multimedia film so that it can travel around the world without her. Planning for that is under way.
While she’d love to perform it live internationally, it’s hard being away from home for long periods given that she’s a mum to daughter Luna, 8, and son Ziggy, 5.
She is proud of the show, which she describes as unique, witty, fearless, provocative, moving and “quite crazy”.
“I want an audience to walk out and be like, ‘Holy s**t’,” she says.
Morgana is most famous for her role in the Emmy award-winning short-form series INSiDE, made in 2020 with her director husband Peter Salmon.
Their Emmy lives on a sideboard in their Auckland lounge. “We did think about getting its own floating shelf, but it’s very big, gold, heavy and American,” she says. “Our Kiwi sensibilities could not handle the grandeur of putting it on its own pedestal.”
She has also played the roles of Narelle Stang (Wentworth) and Naomi Canning (Neighbours). Next year, she’ll play the lead character Nicole in Three’s new six-part drama series Friends Like Her. Shot between Kaikoura and Auckland, it’s a “big juicy, intriguing, salacious tale”.
She could be talking about Stories About My Body with that synopsis,
because it features nudity and some laugh-out-loud moments, including when she relives her job at a New York foot fetish club.
Aged in her 20s and broke, she was paid good money to have her feet licked and tickled by those who find it a “kink”.
“That was a clever thing my body did,” she quips.
The final part of the show is then about pregnancy and birth and and features a video of her delivering her own youngest child, filmed by her midwife on her iPhone, and saved permanently to Morgana’s favourites folder.
“For people who haven’t had children, it’s part of our social narrative that birth is the most terrifying and painful day of your life, and I am on a single-handed mission to try to demystify and unpick that,” she says.
“That’s a major message in the show. Fear equals tension, tension equals pain, and birth is not necessarily the most comfortable thing in the world, but it’s awesome and it’s possible to have a really transformative time.”
She then says: “By the end [of the show], it’s all of the things that my body is capable of,” adding that the show is a moment in time, reflective of her age and stage.
And like all good stories, its core