The child at the centre of Claire Dowie’s memory monologue feels isolated and unloved. The adult she has become recalls that “the feeling is an empty feeling, a hole in your stomach.” You were “trapped in your feelings of hurt and frustration and lack of love… that makes you hit out.”
She describes herself as an untidy, clumsy, fidgety child or so her parents made her seem. Her dad, at one point, tried to make her less fidgety by tying her rigidly to a chair for a while. They also sometimes made her sit in the cupboard under the stairs “to learn respect”, not that she considered any of this as child abuse.
Her one moment of pleasure was the friendly greetings from the lady with a dog called Benji, who lived down the road and called her a scallywag. “She loved my lady”, who made her feel special.
We hear how the small child invented an imaginary friend called Benji who would suggest ways of responding to her situation. When she overheard a neighbour referring to the lady down the road as “a stupid old cow”, she was so angry that Benji suggested throwing a brick through their window.
She got away with that one, but later expressions of her emotions, such as throwing a hammer at a teacher and even hitting her dad with a hammer, resulted in visits to a psychiatrist and, subsequently, as an adult living on her own. Disturbing neighbours with her shouts, she was sectioned by police. Although she spent six weeks in detention, her family visited only once.
Claire Dowie, as the adult child, is engaging and animated in her physical and verbal delivery. What could have been a gloomy story is lifted by her touches of humour and a later section that offers a hopeful positive message about the character’s future.
Adult Child Dead Child, first performed at the Finborough Theatre in 1987, is one of four plays from four decades that Claire Dowie is now performing in repertoire.