If you have ever questioned the values you were brought up with, but still can’t seem to shake them, The Cardinal Rules will speak to you. Photo: Supplied.
Given some of the more sober themes explored in Rose Maher’s The Cardinal Rules – the final presentation for the MERRIGONGX 2024 season – you’d never guess the seed for the production was planted in a clown school in France.
“I was studying a method called ‘Bouffon’ (buffoon), which is a sort of dark clown, and in one assignment we were asked to bring in our own character to mock,” the actor, theatre-maker and clown says.
“It needed to be a sort of high-status character in our lives; someone we might want to ‘take down’ in a way.
“It was a diverse class. We had students from countries like Chile, Spain and China and everyone had their dictators. As a white Australian, I wondered who mine was. And then it hit me was planted the church.”
The same week Rose presented her character “the cardinal” to her clowning class, former cardinal George Pell was arrested on child sexual assault charges.
Though the protagonist in her latest production resulted from that seed sitting in Rose’s back pocket and sprouting after she returned to Australia during COVID, there is no actual cardinal in The Cardinal Rules.
Presented in collaboration with exciting new collective Hurrah Hurrah productions, The Cardinal Rules is billed as an inventive eulogy mashing heartfelt personal storytelling with visually stunning physical theatre.
Inspired by Rose’s Catholic upbringing in Canberra circa 1997, it explores the beauty and complexity of a tight-knit community, indoctrinated into silence when their voices were needed the most.
The third of four children raised Catholic and school captain at both St Bede’s School and St Clare’s College in Canberra, Rose says she’s a “wonderful archetype” of that world.
“This project marks a significant moment in my journey as an artist leading a team to tell this personal and culturally complex story,” she says.
“If you have ever questioned the values you were brought up with, but still can’t seem to shake them, then this show will speak to you.”
Touching and playful, this ambitious new work invites the audience into a conversation about the moments that shift our faith and perspective, told through the story of a coming to terms with separation from devout Catholicism.
“Nobody would want to sit through an hour of the cardinal. That’s not relatable. The Catholic schoolgirl, on the other hand, very relatable, and she’s someone we all know; someone I know … This is a story I can tell,” Rose says.
“Thematically it explore that idea of the power of the church encroaching on domesticity and dictating our personal lives. The ways we’re physically disciplined in the public arena of the church and how it begins to infiltrate the way we live our lives, and potentially, cause us to lose touch with our sense of self.
“I’d begun my own reckoning with my Catholic upbringing years before looking at this production, but it became source materials to ask some questions. What have I been told up to this point and do I accept it? And if I let that go, where does that leave me?
“That’s a scary cliff’s edge to look at, because when you have that upbringing there’s the theological framework and the community framework. This can be quite inextricably linked to our sense of belonging and sense of ‘self’. So where do we hang up our coat and sit when we no longer subscribe to the theological, and those strong community frameworks fall away?”
The Cardinal Rules shows at Bruce Gordon Theatre in the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre from Thursday 31 October, Friday 1 and Saturday 2 November at 7:30 pm. For this event there is no set ticket price. Instead, simply reserve a spot via the Merrigong Box Office and pay what you feel the performance is worth afterwards.
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