Seacliff: Demise of Ward 5 - A Musical Tragedy

Seacliff: Demise of Ward 5 - A Musical Tragedy

37 Women Killed in Mental Hospital Fire

And we’re singing about it...

Dunedin, Otago, November 13, 2015– The Winner of New Zealand’s got talent has written a musical about Dunedin’s biggest tragedy, a fire that killed 37 women locked in their rooms at Seacliff Mental Hospital. It opens on the 3rd of December for 5 performances only.
How does one write a musical from such horror?

Well why not? Chicago sings and dances about female prison inmates, these were prisoners of a different kind. Their stories are more tragic because they are more relatable, but this is a piece of our own history that New Zealand has largely forgotten.

For 10 years, New Zealand's got talent winner, Renee Maurice has been obsessed with bringing into the spotlight one of New Zealand's least talked about tragedies to honour its victims. She’s doing it in the way she knows best – through music. “When I first heard of the tragedy I was 15, and it stayed with me” she remembers. “I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard about it, and when I asked around, it seemed nobody knew. I felt a terrible injustice had been done to these women, and that their stories needed to be told.”

In 1942 a fire broke out in the women's wing of Seacliff Mental Hospital in Dunedin, killing 37 of the 39 patients who were locked in their rooms. The hospital was known as a recipe for disaster; it was built on subsiding land, the structure was wooden with no internal fire prevention, the rooms were locked from the outside and checks by nursing staff done only hourly due to the WWII nursing shortage.

3 times Stan Forbes Medal recipient, Joseph Corbett plays Seacliff guard, Willem Lucas. He says that the tarnished golden days of Seacliff represented the stoic Kiwi attitude of “smacking some sense into the afflicted”. What would now be considered human rights violations, treatments such lobotomies and sterilisation were routinely carried out at Seacliff. In researching the historical accounts Joseph comments,“the stories of recovery we found were often exceptional or overrated”. A painful truth.

Seacliff: Demise of Ward 5 celebrates what recovery meant to the women who perished in the fire, their incredible strength, camaraderie and bravery in the face of ostracism, and sheds some light on the events leading up to the fire.

Was this tragedy largely ignored because the victims were considered insane? New Zealand is not immune from “othering”, ignoring, laughing at or worse, illogically fearing people experiencing mental health struggles, and yet the same hospital was also home for some time to one of New Zealand's most famous and celebrated writers. Had Janet Frame been there in December 1942 we would probably never have known her genius.

Many of the cast and crew involved in Seacliff have their own stories to tell, which drew them to being a part of this historical production. Brenda Jones, who was voiced trained by Vincente Major and in Britain with Florence Norberg knows only too well the setting for Seacliff. She was once a psychiatric nurse in real life. “Mental health is still the 'poor cousin' of medicine in my opinion and large proportions of society still hold serious misconceptions about it. In the days of Seacliff, Mental illness, generally speaking was seen as something that needed to be disciplined and controlled, and frequently also, feared.” She hopes that the production will open the eyes of the audience to not only the historical injustices, but how far we’ve come, and how far we’ve yet to go.

It is well documented now that the stigma of mental “illness” is what prevents people from seeking help and recovering fully but nearly half of New Zealand’s population will experience mental ill health in their life time, so anything that will help us to open the conversation is worth celebrating.

Lindsay Edgecomb, (Charlie’s Farm, Shortland Street, Step Dave) plays Grace, the woman central to the story. “The musical has shock value for the audience. It’s a pretty hard hitting story” she says, but “love, above all else radiates hope and eliminates darkness.”

Seacliff: Demise of Ward 5 premieres at the Mayfair Theatre in Dunedin from the 5th till the 8th of December Only. Tickets atwww.eventfinda.co.nz

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