New play: Five monologues about abortion

The Voice in My Head 
By Jodie Molloy
Basement Theatre, Auckland
May 24 –June, 4

A powerful and thought-provoking new one-woman theatre show will have its world premiere season at Auckland’s Basement Theatre next month.

Starring Natalie Medlock (Shortland Street, The Almighty Johnsons) and written, directed and self-funded by Jodie Molloy (The Jaquie Brown Diaries),” The Voice in My Head” is a new work that confronts the topic of abortion through five unique and engaging monologues.

They take the audience on a journey through a spectrum of comedy and tragedy, moving in space and time from Victorian era Europe to mid-century Brooklyn, into the depths of WWII and from modern-day Melbourne to an imagined future in 2045. Each monologue reflects on the character’s perceptions and experience of relationships and motherhood and, subsequently, her morality.

No character is the same and each piece is designed to illuminate different points of view not often explored.  Playwright Jodie Molloy developed the idea for The Voice in My Head” while completing her masters of studies in creative writing at Cambridge University in the UK.

The show is a first in what Molloy hopes will be a long-standing, annual series of monologue work, each instalment featuring a different female issue.  

“The inaugural piece features a narrative theme of ‘abortion’ and while this remains a contentious social issue, the work itself has no political statement to make other than encouraging dialogue.

"One in four New Zealand women have experienced abortion and yet it’s still not something we talk about naturally or easily.   

“I’m exploring this common yet perniciously taboo experience from the perspectives of five  different characters from the past, present and future. I hope the audience – irrespective of personal dogma – can contemplate and respect the journey each character takes.”  

Each monologue is framed by the use of stylised audiovisual elements crafted by media guru Paul Casserly (Eating Media Lunch, The Unauthorised History of New Zealand) and sound design by musician Paul McLaney (Gramsci, Pop-Up Globe Theatre Company). 

Veteran theatre and television actor/director Oliver Driver worked as dramaturg during the Basement Theatre’s Play Science! script development workshop for this new theatre piece. 

What binds the work and the stories isn’t the abortion event itself but the universal experience of loss that each person faces either before or afterward. And by following women from Victorian England through to the future, this compelling new work inevitably examines how far society has come in treating this subject matter not just socially but also politically and bio-ethically.  After the Auckland season, the play will have its international premiere at the prestigious Corpus Playroom at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge in the UK on June 10 and 11.

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