Review – No Privacy

Homelessness is often intractably tied with drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness and family violence. In writing about a middle-class housewife who faces none of these issues but is a bit dejected because she has to wash clothes in public bathrooms, Tony Moore misses the chance to tell a more nuanced and challenging tale.

The audience finds a woman (Joanna Webb) sleeping on a park bench while waiting for her clothes to dry in the bushes. After an undignified awakening, the woman relates how she fell from being a financially comfortable housewife to sleeping rough.

While a reminder to feel thankful for our circumstances never goes astray, I had to wonder: did Moore feel that if he wrote about a woman who was not middle-class, she would be a less sympathetic character? Should audiences feel bothered by that assumption?

Surprisingly for a tale about living on the fringes of society, Moore largely ignores unsavoury issues. There is no mention of drug abuse or mental illness; no dysfunctional childhood or domestic violence; no contact with the criminal justice system. Our character has rheumatism in her shoulder but otherwise appears reasonably healthy and well-adjusted; the emotional strain of being on guard 24/7 does not seem to have affected her too badly. Despite repeatedly reminding us that the lack of privacy is the toughest thing about homelessness, the character makes no reference to the risk of sexual assault faced by women sleeping rough. Her examples of hardship are more along the lines of: “People see me brush my teeth.”

Homeless people often not only lack a home but are also disconnected from family and wider society. The monologue touches on this issue but the tangent about an adult daughter who drifted away for no particular reason fails to add much depth to the piece. The explanation of the estrangement was so bland that I searched for clues that mum was an unreliable narrator: could the daughter be in some trouble of her own? Was there a fight that mum tries to forget? Either the subtext was too subtle or Moore wanted to present the character in the most blameless light.

Webb is an earnest actress whose references to Adelaide locations kept audiences engaged, but overall I felt that No Privacy tried to portray a complex problem in an overly simplistic manner.