Kids dissect parents’ divorces on stage – and break your heart in the process

Between rehearsal scenes, the kids muck about as kids do: flipping footy cards, grabbing snacks, popping those bubble-pop fidget toys that have suddenly taken over the world.

Then they get on stage and break your heart.

The cast of The Dispute in rehearsal at Arts House.Credit: Chris Hopkins

“You have to accept not getting what you want,” says one of the performers. He’s talking about the aftermath of his parents’ separation. And they are his words, from a script created from his real experience. If his parents hadn’t broken up, he muses, “I would probably be a very different person”.

From the boy who knows, the challenge to identity that divorce imposes on a child.

This is the power of The Dispute, in Melbourne for the RISING festival. In 2019, French director Mohamed El Khatib conceived and directed La Dispute, one of his “documentary theatre” works.

The 41-year-old director, born in France to Moroccan parents, uses theatre to explore the “ordinary”: he prefers experience to expertise, personal accounts to professional analysis.

In developing a work to examine parental breakup, he didn’t bother talking to psychologists, jurists or sociologists. Over several months he interviewed 100 children, aged about eight. How were they affected? Did they take sides? Did they guess it would happen? How did it change their lives?

He made their words into a script, and the children performed it.

The result was full of emotion – and humour. Rejecting expertise for experience opened the door to surprise, to lines that jar with expectations, sometimes gloriously.

The Australian version, for example, critiques the bathroom options available now that a child’s parents live in two different homes.

But it doesn’t pull punches, either. In a “truth-telling” scene near the end, a child addresses the audience: “By having a kid, you have made a promise to protect them”.

The cast of The Dispute with director Jackson Castiglione.Credit: Chris Hopkins

Another, recalling the day he was told his parents were leaving each other, says it feels like “two people are leaving the child”.

Director Jackson Castiglione is recreating El Khatib’s work in Australia. In February there was a first round of “research interviews” with families who had been through parental separation with children aged 8 to 12. They were told the interview questions “will be carefully crafted to ensure the conversation is from the child’s point of view, exploring their perception of this event”.

After an “easy and gentle audition process”, the successful cast members were chosen.

Castiglione says one of the joys of the play is that it challenges preconceptions: it turns out, for example, that children often prefer their divorced family to the one before.

“It was the vulnerability of the children, and the courage, and also the humour,” he says, that blew him away.

“As soon as I saw the children connecting with the story, the lightness and resilience in which they talk about this subject matter, I was like … Oh my God, [El Khatib] is really able to capture the courage of childhood, this indestructible innocence, where they don’t judge things in the way that adults do. Their problems are far more immediate – and in some ways the resolutions are as well.”

He says the process has been “enabling and empowering” for its cast and others he interviewed; some children went away with questions for their parents that they’d thought about for a long time but never asked because they didn’t know they were able to.

But he has also had to be very aware that he’s playing with dynamite. A child welfare officer was in the room at all times, and he’s made it clear to the kids that they could always “opt out”. The production has a child psychologist attached, and it consulted Stepfamilies Australia.

“In most instances, the kid has done a lot of thinking and a lot of talking, or there’s been enough time between the separation and this process to be able to reflect on it in a way that’s not triggering or traumatic,” Castiglione says.

In many ways, children find it easier to talk about parental separation than their parents do. And that, for Castiglione, is another strength of the work. He feels a taboo around talking about separated families needs to be overcome.

“I think part of our society is afraid of children finding things difficult in their lives,” he says. “Life is difficult, and it’s not the difficulties but how the adults respond … that’s really important.

“We don’t trust children to own their own stories. And it’s been a real privilege to be working with these children and families to make this show.”

The Dispute runs from May 27 to June 5 at Arts House.