Milk and Blood are the third and fourth instalments in Benjamin Nichol’s anthology series of works for solo performers. The preceding plays, kerosene and SIRENS, similarly played as a double bill at fortyfivedownstairs a year ago and were roundly lauded (this critic, sadly, did not see them). There are threads which run through these works – in Nichol’s own words, ‘love, loneliness, violence and resilience’ – but to reduce them thus would be to take away from their distinctiveness. One might equally say that what they have in common is craft – and, indeed, heart, for both are, despite their toughness, deeply compassionate. I have seen a lot of middling and, frankly, bad high-concept work on Melbourne stages recently, after which Milk and Blood came as a relief (not a revolve in sight!). Pared back, and by turns lyrical and gritty, both plays demonstrate that ‘text-based’, playwright- rather than director-led theatre can still turn a few tricks.

In Milk, Nichol unspools a story of violence, devotion, and familial dysfunction. Mummy (Brigid Gallacher) is a single mother who works as a carer at an assisted living facility. She’s both tough, chiselled by hardship, and lifeful – she drinks and smokes, and goes clubbing on her own (younger men still notice her). She has two boys to different fathers. One, Doug, is young, sweet but nervy. The other, Boy, is older, and in prison for a violent crime Mummy swears he did not commit. Every Sunday she visits him, kissing him twice on the lips as she has always done and filling him in on the latest developments in her life. Boy means the world to her – Doug, heartbreakingly, sees and absorbs this – and she describes motherhood in glowing, almost ecstatic terms. Nevertheless, as she tells us many times over, ‘it takes strength to love someone.’ The truth of that statement sits at the heart of Milk, which, as much as anything else, is about the unique bond between mothers and their sons – its obsessional, distorting qualities, and, ultimately, its limits.

The subject of Blood is Daddy (Charles Purcell), a figurative rather than biological father. He’s a ‘faggot’, he cheerily tells us at the beginning of the play, and a male escort who specialises in BDSM. He has a son of sorts of his own: Pup, a younger man who lives with him and with whom he has a complicated relationship. Daddy, of course, is a dom and takes his work seriously. Just as he was once mentored by queer elders, so too does he pass on what he has learned in workshops for aspiring male sex workers. A text message from a former lover rattles him in a way we suspect he is unaccustomed to. Then, working out at the gym one day, Daddy exchanges glances with a well-built young man – a high school student, it transpires, whom Daddy dubs Strong Boy. When, walking alone at night through an underpass, Daddy is called a ‘faggot’ and bashed, he notices Strong Boy among his assailants, a paragon of internalised homophobia. The assault’s repercussions are far-reaching but Blood, like Milk, is finally a statement of hope rather than its opposite.   

Brigid Gallacher as Mummy in Milk (photograph by Sarah Walker)

In their way, both works are reminiscent of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads – still the gold standard of plays for solo performers – but in its astringency Milk reminded me more of Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys. Nichol, like Kelly, is interested in the gendered nature of violence, but for my money Milk is the superior piece of writing. Unlike Kelly, Nichol resists the urge to didacticise, to mistake the stage for a lecture theatre. Rather, Milk is a fully realised drama that refuses to swap out the spell it casts for pat social commentary. Its hard-edged but tender portrait of a mother undergoing a crisis of faith is never less than vivid and absorbing.

Gallacher is, perhaps, the play’s ideal vehicle. Warm but brittle, vivacious yet heavy-hearted, it’s a performance rich in nuance, both verbally and physically dexterous. When relaying the words of her sons or new lover Billy, her voice and face expertly drop, seemingly effortlessly taking on the slumped physicality and cadences of the Australian Male. When speaking of motherhood, of the milk that flows from her breasts like a connective river, she really does appear to glow. Gallacher’s performance also, I think, usefully emphasises one of the subtler dimensions of Nichol’s play: the issue of class, which for example manifests in the contempt in which Mummy is held by other, more affluent mothers.

Blood, it must be said, suffers a little by comparison with its predecessor (it may have been wiser to swap the running order so that the more substantial and affecting Milk closed rather than opened the proceedings). It didn’t help, either, that Purcell, as good as he is, gave a much less assured performance than Gallacher on opening night. Nevertheless, Daddy is, in his way, every bit as fascinating a creation as Mummy. Both a libertine and a disciplinarian, Daddy charts a complex course through desire and control. His queerness, unlike that of Strong Boy, is a source of pride rather than shame. Yet he is an inveterate giver, his inability to fully submit to pleasure one of the play’s key drivers. Purcell imbues the role with a steely presence and a muscular physicality. The direction, by Nichols and Purcell himself, introduces occasional gestural and choreographic elements, which are used like punctuation marks to signal the text’s shifting directions. As a piece of writing, Blood is more fragmentary than Milk, but it retains the latter’s pathos and humour, as well as its keen observational qualities. As in Milk, Blood calls upon its performer to inhabit a cast of characters, and Purcell brings each vividly to life, most memorably his histrionic friend Grace.   

At the risk of reaching too hard to find connecting tissue between these works, which were not originally written to be paired together, I think it’s fair to say that both, in the end, are about creation and nurturing. Mummy, of course, has her sons. But Daddy’s lovingly tended garden, wherein he finds solace unavailable to him anywhere else, is its own kind of incubator. At the denouement of Blood, he tells us he ‘feels like a seed’, a carrier of old wisdom and new life.

Milk and Blood continues at Fortyfivedownstairs until 1 September 2024. Performance attended: 16 August.