TIM will be presented by Merrigong Theatre Company and Christine Dunstan productions from the 16th to the 19th of August at Illawarra Performing Arts Centre as part of its premiere regional tour. Tim McGarry’s adaptation of Australian icon Colleen McCullough’s novel TIM sensitively focuses on the unorthodox relationships between Mary, a business woman in her mid-50s and Tim, a 25-year-old gardener with a slight intellectual disability.
What begins as a coincidental opportunity, turns into a melodramatic love story with life-changing consequences sure to make anyone watching shed a tear.
Merrigong Theatre Company’s Acting Artistic Director, Leland Kean, said, “Colleen McCullough’s Tim, is an icon, and one of the greatest Australian novels of all time. It is so wonderful to present this work adapted for the stage by the brilliant Australian playwright and Theatre maker, Tim McGarry.”
TIM features a stellar cast with Ben Goss, a young man with a disability and recent graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, in the title role. Joining Ben on stage will be Valerie Bader, Akkshey Caplash, Jeanette Cronin, Andrew McFarlane and Julia Robertson.
Tim’s disability, whilst never identified in the show, is one of the sub-themes included in the play among others like the importance of embracing differences, opening oneself to the fullness of life and opportunities it has to offer. It is a touching story filled with love, loss and acceptance.
Tim McGarry recently adapted Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe for Queensland Theatre/QPAC and has recently created a new work for the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Between 2005-2017 Tim was a Creative Director and Producer at Monkey Baa, one of Australia’s largest touring companies for young audiences. He has facilitated countless workshops for students and teachers throughout metropolitan, regional, and remote school communities and has worked extensively supporting people with a disability living in residential care.
Colleen McCullough is regarded as one of Australia’s most successful novelists, best known for her second novel The Thorn Birds and for her Masters of Rome series, a fictionalised account of Rome in the age of Julius Caesar. She remains one of Australia’s highest selling authors with over 80 million books sold worldwide, 30 million of which are for TIM, and translated into 30 plus languages. She penned TIM in 1974. First entitled Not the Full Quid, this beautiful work has spawned two movies, the first starring a very young Mel Gibson.
I had the chance to speak with Tim McGarthy about his most recent production TIM. Here’s what I found out.
SERENA: Could you just start by telling us a bit about the show and what it’s about?
TIM: Ok, so, TIM is based on a novel written by Colleen McCullough in the 1970s and the story really centres around two characters: Mary who is a business woman in her mid to late 50s and Tim who is a young gardener who she becomes friends with and their friendship grows into a love story. I guess the drama comes into the piece when not everyone in Tim’s family are understanding of this relationship, particularly his sister. And, there is much discussion and argument among the family about Mary and what her motivations might be. There are a couple of sub-plots within the story itself, but basically, it’s a love story.
SERENA: What inspired you to create an adaptation on the novel?
TIM: I read the book in the late 70s when I was a teenager because my mother had a copy of it. And, it always sat with me as a beautiful story about two people who had fallen in love. In the 90s I left the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts when all actors were performing and my friend at my other job where I was working at the time, suggested that I worked part-time or casually, when I needed the money, in a group home for people with disabilities. So, I started working in a group home and I became aware of the plight of people living with disabilities in our community. I would take them out shopping and to the movies and I would see, not so much how they interacted with the community, but how the community interacted with them. And, my mind kept harking back to this story and I thought it was a great vehicle to kind of reflect society’s overall perceptions and misconceptions of people with disability.
SERENA: What did you observe about the community and their interactions with people with disabilities?
TIM: I guess there was a whole range of reactions. Some of them were a kind of unconscious bias – an unconscious lack of understanding that people with disabilities had the same rights as the rest of us. I would find going to shops, restaurants and medical practices that often the staff would speak to me and not to the person with a disability. I would always refer back and say, ‘I think this question is for this person not for me.’ So, it was interesting how people – not ignored – but it was just a perception that the people needed someone to interpret the world for them and they don’t. So, I guess that’s one thing that stuck in my mind. Also, the way that people subconsciously didn’t give the people with a disability their own agency – they didn’t give them a choice. They didn’t realise but it was often in so many circumstances, in so many situations that they were treated differently.
SERENA: Does disability play into the themes of the adaptation?
TIM: Interestingly, it’s not the main theme for me. It was kind of a vehicle for how people observed other people. When I first wrote the earlier draft, I was very specific in terms of Tim’s disability and the more I talked about it with the director, the more I realised that’s not the point of the story. I don’t need to be didactic and tell people what his disability is. We just see his disability in the way it plays out, in terms of the way he interacts and the things that he finds difficult or he finds different to the rest of us. So, one of the things that I kind of used to highlight his disability is his way of hearing the world, some sounds he hears differently from the rest of us and he reacts differently to sound. So, I guess that’s how disability kind of works out from a character point of view. But I never saw disability as the overall arching theme of the piece, it really is a piece of how we as a society and how his family construct a narrative around a love story that is different from what the love story actually is. It’s certainly there as a part of the play but not a major part of the play.
SERENA: From my understanding, TIM explores the importance of embracing differences and opening oneself to the fullness of life. Could you expand on this idea a bit more?
TIM: Absolutely, so in the piece Tim, through his growing friendship with Mary, discovers what love is and what it is to feel differently towards someone who you fall in love with. And, I think that that’s what it equates to. His ability to understand love and his ability to fall in love and his ability to discover another part of the world that he hadn’t been exposed to. And, the same goes for Mary. Mary being a business woman in her mid to late 50s hadn’t experienced that either. For both of them, for many reasons, their discovering their first love – one just happens to be 25/26 and the other person just happens to be in their late 50s – in terms of finding love and discovering that together for the first time.
SERENA: What are you expecting the audience to walk out with?
TIM: I always think this is the hardest question. I think, from a general point of view, everyone takes something different depending on their life experience. I guess, what I hope the audience takes is that they understand the world a little better than they did when they walked in. That they understand that love is love and who are any of us to judge or discriminate when two people fall in love – whether it’s an age factor, whether it’s a gender factor, religious factor – whatever the factor is, whatever the differences are, I hope the audience walk away with empathy for people in the community that find love in many different forms and many different ways. I guess, that’s my main takeaway. For me, when I come away from a piece, I often ask myself, ‘am I different or do I know something else about the world than before I walked in’, and I guess that’s the question the audience will hopefully ask themselves. It’s always a very tricky question that one. You know, because everyone takes something according to what they have going on in their life. Like, someone with a disability could feel validated from the show, whilst someone who is older and hoping for a second chance in life could hopefully get that positive message from the show. Everyone will probably get something different from it. But, I always think that theatre is about gaining empathy and understanding.
Get your tickets here.
Photo credit: Branco Gaica