Given the paucity of feminist films in the Australian canon, Sydney Theatre Company’s decision to revitalise the classic romantic comedy Muriel’s Wedding as a stage musical should be cause for celebration. However, in making subtle yet distinct changes to both story and theme, the politics of the work is changed almost beyond recognition, calling into question whether it should have been dredged up from its glory box to begin with.
In her original 1994 incarnation, Muriel Heslop is the social pariah of the coastal backwater town Porpoise Spit. Overweight and overlooked, our marginalised anti-heroine is desperate for escape. This initially comes in the form of the music of Abba and fantasies of romantic love and wedding bells. It soon takes on a much more literal dimension when she opportunistically robs her domineering father and high-tails it to Sydney, reinventing herself as “Marial”, flanked by best friend Rhonda.
Here, the film’s writer-director, PJ Hogan, replaces the traditional boy-gets-girl narrative with the enduring love of female friendship. In the climax of the film, “Mariel”, dressed as a 90s bridal meringue, is confronted by Rhonda over her delusions of personhood through partnership. Marriage, rather than geography, represents the ultimate liberation from the “stupid, fat and useless” Muriel of Porpoise Spit, a goal so paramount that she is willing to invest in a sham wedding to realise it. The scene is a masterstroke in genre subversion and foreshadows the film’s final scenes in which, with echoes of Thelma and Louise, the newly restored Muriel leaves her husband to reclaim Rhonda’s friendship, the two flipping the bird to their small hometown and the restrictive mindsets within it.
In the all-singing, all-dancing stage musical update, this narrative and its implicit social commentary is almost unrecognisable. Gone is the bolshy ending; instead, a character who barely had four minutes of air time in the film – Brice, literally the first person Muriel kissed – returns to declare his love and drive both her and Rhonda to “happily ever after” on a bicycle trailer. While in the film, Muriel walked away from her faux-relationship with the hunky visa-chasing South African swimmer David after their first copulation; in the musical, her husband is a closeted Russian who realises the truth about his sexuality only after sleeping with Muriel. Crucially, where Muriel desperately sought marriage as proof of being “somebody”, she now not only desires marriage but, as importantly, Insta-fame. In conflating such disparate desires, Hogan not only identifies himself as belonging to the techno-panic generation, he also calls into question the very thing that endeared feminists to the film: its criticism of marriage as the pinnacle of female achievement.
Marriage was, and still is, for many women, an expected social and legal milestone. For conservatives especially, it’s commonly viewed through the prism of paternalism: something that, in the words of the former prime minister Tony Abbott, “evolved many centuries ago to protect women and children”. Such attitudes are broadly reflected in state reliance on married unions and associated domestic unpaid labour to maintain economic growth, while carrying strong cultural implications. In film, female protagonists are more likely to be in pursuit of relationship goals than career milestones. Reinforced by the rating success of this year’s Bachelorette, the search for a husband is often deemed the loftiest height for women, especially when an audience is watching.
Refusing to capitulate to marriage, as Muriel and Rhonda did, defiantly bucked this trend. In doing so, the film exposed the narrow avenue for fulfilment within a traditionally patriarchal institution. In 1994, Hogan radically repurposed romantic comedy for feminist commentary, apparently supporting whilst actually sabotaging the genre. But now, in 2017, he serves up a moral staler than a wedge of wedding cake under a pillow. The goal is once again coupledom, albeit with your BFF in tow.
In the film, Hogan challenges the institution of marriage further by undermining the supposed success and safety of women who had found their Prince Charming. Antagonist Tanya’s betrayal by her philandering husband Chook (on their wedding day no less) is both narrative justice for her bad behaviour while serving as strong indictment on a culture of unchecked male entitlement. The suicide of Betty, Muriel’s mother, is emblematic of society’s blind spot for the social and fiscal vulnerability of ageing women. Having spent years in unacknowledged service to her dictatorial husband, Betty is eventually traded in for his younger mistress and “coincidence”, Deirdre Chambers. In her final scene, Betty, without credit or recourse, is reduced to stealing a pair of comfort sandals just to relieve herself of the pain of her ill-fitting heels. It is a beautiful, tragic allegory for outward adherence to femininity masking the deep impacts of cultural misogyny. In the stage version, however, Betty is portrayed as delusional, confronted not by the stark economic reality of single life but by memories of her departed, dancing husband, as if being forlorn is the worst fate that an ageing woman without superannuation can expect.
Muriel’s subsequent epiphany, prompting her to walk away from the financial protection afforded by her upwardly mobile husband, was the film’s penultimate display of female strength and self-assurance. In the stage show, belief in a world in which a woman can be treated equitably without a ring on her finger seems non-existent. Muriel is no longer Nora leaving A Doll’s House but rather a comic foil who accidentally slept with a closeted gay man.
More than simply a Hollywood-isation of the original, this new adaptation implicitly reveals the necessity of placing female creatives at the helm of their own cultural revolution. “It’s PJ Hogan’s baby ultimately”, admitted STC’s artistic director, Kip Williams, and therein lies the rub. In her original context, Muriel represented a movement towards fair representation of women on and off screen, still in infancy. Now fully matured and treading the boards, this new Muriel is frightfully symbolic of the degradation of challenging depictions of women – a phenomenon with the continued industrial exclusion of female writers and directors at the root. What a faithful update of the beloved national heroine would look like remains unknown, as still on our stage and screens, female creatives are relegated to the role of bridesmaid.
Sitting in the darkened auditorium on opening night, the audience audibly held their breath as the famous line was uttered, “You’re terrible, Muriel.” As the house lights came up at the conclusion of the performance, I had to admit that for women in 2017, unfortunately Muriel, you really are.
