Patricia Cornelius is a playwright drawn to society’s marginalia – the abject, the criminal, the poor and downtrodden. As a result, her work has existed largely on the fringes of the mainstream; she is primarily regarded as an outsider artist, perhaps even as Australian theatre’s preeminent dissident. How, then, do we square this with My Sister Jill, a main-stage production for Melbourne Theatre Company that flirts with the “dun-coloured realism” of a novelist like George Johnston?
It’s not her first time on a space like this. She adapted Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba for MTC back in 2018, transplanting the seething emotional turmoil of an Andalusian family to Western Australia. My Sister Jill is her adaptation of her own 2002 semi-autobiographical novel, and while it contains signature stylistic quirks – namely the staccato sentences and choral layering, the uncanny use of vernacular and slang – it feels worlds away from the kind of gut-punch agitprop of earlier works such as Runt or Shit.
