Sharon Pollock: Transfiguring the Maternal

Abstract

Sharon Pollock's Doc is a watershed play not only because it is her most intensely personal work to date, but also because the protagonist-daughter confronts her ambivalence on yet another front: the relationship to the maternal. After the play ends with what seems a tidy resolution, the ghost of Bob, the mother, lives on to inhabit the character of subsequent mothers: Eme in Getting it Straight and Joan in Fair Liberty's Call. The treacherous stepmother in Blood Relations and the complicit adoptive mother, Mama George, in Whiskey Six Cadenza, are supplanted by more complicated and more sympathetic maternal figures. In Doc, Pollock bravely raises ghosts from her own past. Once summoned, they bring with them new challenges.