If It Bleeds: The Christine Chubbuck Story

In 1974, an anchor on a small-town TV station shot herself in the head, live on her morning talk show. Her act and her famous final words (‘And now, in keeping with Channel 40’s policy of always bringing you the latest in blood and guts, in living colour, you’re about to see another first – an attempted suicide.’) inspired the landmark film Network two years later.

The Artisan Collective have created an imagined portrait of Christine Chubbuck, written by Brendan McCallum, exploring her lack of personal fulfilment, and her frustration with her position and the quality of journalism at her network, WXLT-TV, that led to her eventual suicide.

When theatre is made on behalf of real people, I feel it’s important not only to make a work that stands on its own, but that accurately reflects the person it purports to speak for. I made the mistake of looking up Christine Chubbuck online, and I find the real Christine much more magnetic in the 20-odd seconds of footage that exist of her than the entire 80 minutes of Lauren Urquhart’s portrayal of her in this production. This isn’t to detract from Urquhart’s performance, which wasn’t bad at all, but Chubbuck herself is a powerful presence. Urquhart plays Chubbuck as lost, meditative, occasionally spiky and resigned, while the real Chubbuck was intimidating, mercurial, handsome and direct.

Most of If It Bleeds is, from what I can infer, based on an excellent article written at the time by Sally Quinn for the Washington Post. Filled with interviews with her colleagues and family, Quinn’s article even provides McCallum with one of the work’s best lines: ‘She’s got this whole ‘I can handle it – but not really’ air about her,’ says George Ryan, the man who rejected (and was then rejected by) Chubbuck. I’m sad to say that Quinn’s article was actually a more arresting read than If It Bleeds was to watch, detailing as it does the eloquent insights of Chubbuck’s mother and brother, and the foiling of Chubbuck’s intention – for her suicide and its statement to be broadcast worldwide – through a court injunction.

Director Ben Pfeiffer has made the brave decision to stage If It Bleeds in American accents – always a dangerous thing to do, because there’s nothing like a fluffed foreign accent to send a needle of wonkiness through the brains of your audience. Possibly not everyone is as sensitive to a bad accent as I am, but Kristina Brew’s southern accent was so ridiculous that I found it hard to focus on what she was actually saying. Nor was she the only perpetrator: there were six actors on stage, each with a different American sub-accent of varying quality.

Large parts of If It Bleeds seemed just a smidge off the mark. The set design was fine but uninspiring, the costumes almost there but not quite, Chubbuck’s own hobby of making puppets replaced with an allegorical puppet character, and a certain amount of what I can only describe as ‘word soup poetry’ that doesn’t appear to have any provenance from Chubbuck’s life. McCallum’s work seems preoccupied with Chubbuck’s loneliness and desire for love and family, without managing to portray the personal force-field which kept her from them. Chubbuck is reduced to a wronged woman, cursed in love and exploited at work, rather than the strong, argumentative, and wilful character her family and colleagues paint her as.

As a stand-alone work without reference to Chubbuck herself, this is by no means a terrible bit of theatre. Urquhart’s performance is consistently good and her scene alone with her mother Peg (Felicity Soper) is the work’s most powerful moment. But as a portrait of a strong person thinking about suicide, it’s hard to see that it offers much insight.

Rating: 2 ½ stars out of 5

Studio Theatre, Gasworks Arts Park, Albert Park
17 – 27 October