Elise Greig

Magpie is a new work for theatre that will have its world premiere season at Brisbane Powerhouse in May 2019.  A collaboration between 3 key Queensland arts organisations - Metro, Playlab and Powerhouse - will work with e.g. to bring Magpie to life.

Mordecai, a novelist dealing with a bad review, returns to her family’s Brisbane home for the first time in decades following the death of her father. The home conjures echoes from her distant past: the muggy summers, the smell of rotting mangoes, and the perpetual arguments between her Romani mother and father. 

When she discovers her old journal; an innocent tapestry of ideas, drawings, and imaginings; Mordecai is drawn back to 1961 and a long-abandoned investigation into her parents’ unhappiness. Pushed along by her childhood friend Splinter, Mordecai sets out to uncover the long-dormant secrets that cursed her family and led to her leaving home at fifteen.

Spanning from young love to aging cynicism, Magpie is a coming-of-age story that will thrill and delight like lemonade ice-blocks and a swim on a hot summer's day.

The play explores the idea of transgenerational emotional inheritance, that if trauma and/or grief are not dealt with they are passed to the next generation. In this instance, the emotional inheritance that is passed from parent to child across three generations. What if Mordecai shakes these assumptions, traumas and emotional inheritances out of the family tree? What if she doesn’t?

It also explores the concept of the outsider.  Romani is a metaphor for difference, other, misunderstood minority, the overlooked untouchables, the pariah. So too are magpies, hence the title. Vaclav Havel said the treatment of the Roma is a litmus test for democracy.  Romani, contrary to popular belief, is not the same as gypsy.  You can choose to be a gypsy, you can’t choose to be Romani. It is a culture, an ethnicity that is often on the receiving end of the last acceptable form of racism. But it is also a culture that can provide vital insights for similarly marginalised communities throughout Australia. Contemporary Australia continues to wrestle with the key issue of identity, so too does the central character in Magpie.  Mordecai McAlister is an outsider and is therefore in a unique position to question, analyse and reflect on the Australia she is returning to after many years.  As we watch Mordecai debate, investigate and grapple with the assumptions she has made about this place, her culture and her relationship to it, we grapple with these issues too.