Real wild child

A feral child, an orang-utan, an anthropologist, exotica, a French aristocrat, and a shipwreck are among the building blocks of a forthcoming student production of Hilary Bell’s Memmie le Blanc at Union House Theatre.

Directed by Tom Gutteridge and starring Dana McMillan as wild child Memmie, Grace Cummings as the orangutan Robert, Dylan Morgan as George the anthropologist and Madeleine Ryan as Catherine, Memmie le Blanc explores the Rousseauian idea of the noble savage.

The play is based on the true story of Marie-Angelique Memmie le Blanc who spent around 10 years from the age of nine in the early 1700s living outside society in the forests of France. Born into a native American tribe defeated by the French, she was sold into servitude, purchased by a French aristocrat and shipwrecked off the coast of France during a return voyage. She escaped into the woods, and was then captured aged nearly 19 near the northern town of Songie.

Mr Gutteridge explains that Memmie’s is one of the few verifiable stories of wild or feral children, most of which are hoaxes. She was one of the very few who went on to learn to read and write and live within society, although it took her a long time to adapt to eating cooked meat, which she found indigestible.

“There were other adaptations as well. She lived mostly in trees, and had apparently developed very large thumbs to aid climbing. She was captured after coming down from the trees in search of water during a drought.

“Memmie learned, more or less, to deal with the ‘civilised’ world, and wound up dying at old age, which is again unusual. Most feral children don’t live long lives.”

Working with this curious and wonderful story, the play explores the nature of what makes us human, and the elements of human behaviour that we take for granted, as it speculates about how much of our behaviour is ‘instinctive’ and how much learned.

“It’s a four-hander play with Memmie, though in a loving relationship with Catherine, struggling to control her wild urges. Catherine brings her up kindly but with very particular ideas about what it means to be human, while the pre-Darwinian anthropologist George has romanticised ideals about the ‘noble savage’.

“Ironically it turns out that George’s companion Robert the orangutan may be the only ‘civilised’ being among them,” Mr Gutteridge says.

The play’s treatment of the material also highlights colonial attitudes toward Indigenous people, and it is interspersed with strange musical numbers drawn from early 20th century exotica songs such as Princess Papouli has Plenty Papaya, and Get Cannibal,

Actors Grace and Dana have been in training for this very physical play with movement director Teresa Blake, of Circus Oz and deSoxy fame, with sponsorship from Melbourne University Sport in the form of gym access to help finesse their climbing and clambering skills.

“The staging is also amazing,” says Mr Gutteridge. “Joanna Butler, a Master of Architecture student who worked last year on Sweeney Todd (with Stephan Moravski a former student now studying with a full scholarship at the Tisch School of Art and Design in New York) has diagonally divided the Guild Theatre stage, essentially building two worlds.”

“In the foreground is Catherine’s garden, an echo of Memmie’s forest, while behind a high frame-work wall is the Baroque interior of their house, which becomes basically a literal and symbolic cage in which Catherine tries to contain Memmie.”

Union House Theatre presents Memmie le Blanc at the Guild Theatre from 9-10, 14-17 September. More: http://union.unimelb.edu.au/theatre/memmie-le-blanc