CW: Illness, Suicide, Body Horror, Death, Swearing

Note: This review will not contain spoilers.

I have a friend. His name’s Sai and for as long as I’ve known him, he’s been in pain. I always admired his tenacity, and his ability to smile and be endlessly positive, and I made sure he knew that. I wish I’d realised how lonely it must have been for him.

Your Body Is A Wasteland is a post-apocalyptic drama, directed by Emma Maguire, that flits between live scenes that are crushingly real, and recorded video and audio pieces that serve as flashbacks or depictions of ‘the real world’, depending on your interpretation of the work. Performances by Finn McCauley and Hamish Boyle bring the script to life, and leave the audience feeling uncomfortable, but safe at all times.

For the most part, the show is performed solo by Finn MacCauley’s character, The Wanderer. She is a cynical, yet sassy individual leaving behind tapes for anyone following in her footsteps to find. Throughout the show, she delivers her lines in the fourth person. She is neither talking to anyone in the scene, nor the audience directly. Instead, she speaks into the ether, to an audience unbeknownst to us. Think more like Twitch chat, than breaking the fourth wall. The performance is brutal and unwavering. There is an everlasting frown on her face that never goes away. This is a woman in pain and it’s so so so important that we recognise this.

Our second character, Tom, played by Hamish Boyle, presents a more hopeful alternative to the dark path that The Wanderer is threatening to tread upon. They represent a version of The Wanderer beyond their goal, somebody who has found what they need and urges others like them to see it. The upbeat contrast that Tom provides is a relief, his golden retriever energy brightening up the wasteland in his quest to save The Wanderer. Hamish Boyle plays this energy up perfectly opposite Finn McCauley and the two form a dynamic that you’d love to see more of, but you understand that wherever they go, they’ll support each other.

The set is wonderfully laid out as a towering quilt of cardboard boxes greets us at the entrance. Splashes of white paint are strewn about the floor. Stools are upended and the whole stage looks dangerous to touch. Cloths stained with blood make their purpose clear later down the track. Objects are hidden in plain sight. It’s an extremely clever piece of staging that completely sells the audience on a post-apocalypse, despite the low budget afforded to it. It’s creativity at its most frugal and it’s so impressive to behold. The setting, however, is not limited to the Wasteland of The Wanderer’s mind. Spectacular lighting effects by D’ Woods move us from a post-apocalyptic desert to a bar in Oriental Bay. They work perfectly with the set to capture the exact vibe it needs to at any given moment.

At first, the story confused me. I had no inkling of what the setting represented, nor did I understand who the Seer whom The Wanderer was seeking was. The vignettes of recorded videos were interesting and funny at times, but I felt a little lost. That’s the point, I believe. What Your Body Is A Wasteland is tackling is something that people in a position like mine won’t understand at first. We’re not expected to. But, what all these flashbacks and apparent non-sequiturs do is make a promise. A promise that, in time, we will come to understand what Emma Maguire is trying to say with their work.

It’s a promise that gets fulfilled ten times over. The Wasteland doesn’t exist for most of us. Very few have to wander through our lives alone. This story isn’t about us, and the play expertly guides us into a place of truly understanding how lonely people with chronic pain feel as they go through life. If they’re lucky, they’ll find others who can help them, for a time. But with all the little things that must be done to accommodate them, with all the parts of this world that weren’t designed with them in mind, it’s no wonder that so many of them feel so lonely. It’s no wonder they feel like a burden, when everything in this world is so easy for everyone else, and everyone else finds it so hard to elevate them to an equal footing. It’s not fair. We have all the resources we need to help, we just need to do it. It shouldn’t take one person to pull someone back from the brink of self-harm, but a society that protects vulnerable people from the unfairness of life.

I’m going to say this plainly, because everyone needs to fucking understand this.

To people with chronic pain, you are not a burden. There are people who will make you feel like one, there are people who just don’t understand what you’re going through, but you are not burdens. You are human beings and deserve to be treated as such. Every single one of you is valued and whilst there aren’t enough resources being allocated to you, know that you are worth it, and there are people fighting for you.

To the rest of us, we need to do better. We need to check in on our friends and whanau who are suffering, and even those that aren’t, because you never know who’s going through what. I wish I’d checked up on my friend, Sai, more. I wish I’d had more chats with him while he suffered, if only to be a small distraction. I wish he hadn’t died on Saturday, leaving a limitless number of conversations un-had. We don’t have to dedicate our lives to helping those closest to us, we just have to put in the effort to include them. That’s all. Just include them. So that they don’t have to walk through their wastelands alone.

Your Body Is A Wasteland is a call-to-action, a reminder of the bare minimum we can do to elevate our society to a better place, no matter what the current political climate suggests we need to be focusing on. It’s a stunning gut-punch of advice, performed excellently and creatively crafted, that forces us to reckon with the fact that people are suffering silently. They don’t need to.

They don’t have to roam their Wastelands alone.

Your Body Is a Wasteland is running from 30th July to the 3rd of August, 6.30pm at BATS Theatre. Tickets available from the BATS website.

Disclosure: As an active member of the Wellington performing arts community, I am quite familiar with some of the people who have brought this show to life.
Having said that, I am not a liar, and there is zero bias in my reviews, shut up.

Also, tickets were provided to me for free by the production. Literally changes nothing, though.