Love, Death & Other Scenes

After playwright Aidan Fennessy dies during the 2020 covid lockdowns, it is 15 months before his family can hold his memorial. Loss is always unfair, but it feels especially so to happen when everybody had to look after each other by staying apart.

Nova Weetman, an icon of Australian youth literature and Aidan’s partner of 25 years, tells her story in three acts: love, death, and other scenes. Much like grief, it isn’t linear, instead ringing with an intimacy and rawness that will floor you. There is the flush and embarrassment of young love as Nova sees Aidan through an op shop window and falls in love hard and fast, and the emotional and financial valleys and peaks of having a family with two creatives as parents. There is the relatable – getting a covid cat – to the sorrowful: she visits their published works, watching over each other on the State Library shelves. Then the questions: how do you tell your young children their father will die? How do you know the truth of a past, knowing the full stories may not be told because the other keeper of the memories is no longer there to fill in the gaps?

Weetman’s power as a writer can put you in the room with the hardest moments of life; it will also break your heart, make you laugh and dry your tears. Like Natasha Sholl’s Found, Wanting and Leigh Sales’ Any Ordinary Day, this is an exploration of pain and love, and how the two are so tightly wound around each other that it can be hard to pry them apart. It’s also about how in the hardest of times – masked and separated from everybody else in the world, both literally and metaphorically – you can still find the ropes the world throws you.