Actress Morgana O’Reilly has performed her provocative solo show Stories About My Body more than 50 times since its debut last year, and she now has plans to make it into a film. She talks to Carly Gibbs about its journey, and why it’s a show men can also relate to.
When you think back to what an adolescent’s diary might have looked like in the late 1990s, Morgana O’Reilly’s isn’t it.
It wasn’t a Dinky Diary or a pink, fluffy lockable diary.
It was a plain, dark blue leather-bound journal, possibly from Paper Plus.
It held her school-era chronicles, including those about changing bodies.
At 13, she wrote: “I really want to try to vomit after I eat because I heard if you do, you get really skinny, and I really want to be like that.”
Her innocent, sometimes “terrible” memoirs, which she wrote daily during Form 1 and 2 at Ponsonby Intermediate School, form part of her self-written, solo theatre show Stories About My Body, which she’s performed to sell-out crowds more than 50 times in New Zealand and Australia, since April 2022, tweaking it here and there as she goes.
The 38-year-old will perform it again in three shows for the Tauranga Arts Festival from October 24-26.
Following that, a “reincarnation” of it will turn it into a multimedia film so that it can travel around the world without her. Planning for that is under way.
While she’d love to perform it live internationally, it’s hard being away from home for long periods given that she’s a mum to daughter Luna, 8, and son Ziggy, 5.
She is proud of the show, which she describes as unique, witty, fearless, provocative, moving and “quite crazy”.
“I want an audience to walk out and be like, ‘Holy s***’,” she says.
O’Reilly is most famous for her role in the Emmy award-winning short-form series INSiDE, made in 2020 with her director husband Peter Salmon.
Their Emmy lives on a sideboard in their Auckland lounge. “We did think about getting its own floating shelf, but it’s very big, gold, heavy and American,” she says. “Our Kiwi sensibilities could not handle the grandeur of putting it on its own pedestal.”
She has also played the roles of Narelle Stang (Wentworth) and Naomi Canning (Neighbours). Next year, she’ll play the lead character Nicole in Three’s new six-part drama series Friends Like Her. Shot between Kaikōura and Auckland, it’s a “big juicy, intriguing, salacious tale”.
She could be talking about Stories About My Body with that synopsis, because it features nudity and some laugh-out-loud moments, including when she relives her job at a New York foot fetish club.
Aged in her 20s and broke, she was paid good money to have her feet licked and tickled by those who find it a “kink”.
“That was a clever thing my body did,” she quips.
The final part of the show is then about pregnancy and birth and and features a video of her delivering her own youngest child, filmed by her midwife on her iPhone, and saved permanently to O’Reilly’s favourites folder.
“For people who haven’t had children, it’s part of our social narrative that birth is the most terrifying and painful day of your life, and I am on a single-handed mission to try to demystify and unpick that,” she says.
“That’s a major message in the show. Fear equals tension, tension equals pain, and birth is not necessarily the most comfortable thing in the world, but it’s f****** awesome and it’s possible to have a really transformative time.”
She then says: “By the end [of the show], it’s all of the things that my body is capable of,” adding that the show is a moment in time, reflective of her current age and stage.
And like all good stories, its core lies in its foundation.
When it comes to her tween diary entries, she was struck by the “paradox feel” of her adolescent musings, which on one hand are the writings of a child and on the other, someone who is desperate to be a grown-up.
Working some of those diary entries into a stage show and having an objective, “almost retrospectively belittling” take on them, was tough.
She recalls breaking down in rehearsal one day while repeating entries like “I can’t lose weight and I’m fat”.
“That was ‘little me’ saying those awful things. I had such a big cry.”
She then recalls coming off stage in Wellington this year, and because the show is a “love letter” to that 12-year-old, she had the realisation: ‘That’s what this show is. We’re doing right by that little girl.’
She uses humour to lighten the mood, but would not call herself a stand-up comedian.
She is a “storyteller”.
This show is also different to her previous one-woman show The Height of the Eiffel Tower, a play that she made in 2008 to make money so she could travel overseas.
Once away, she performed it in people’s living rooms as a way of thanking them for letting her stay on their couch, and up until 2014 in multiple cities and at festivals, in exchange for a koha.
Using living room lights as opposed to stage lights meant she learned that people’s concentrated faces often resemble “more disgust than beaming faces of wonder”.
“It’s like when you look over at someone in the car next to you in traffic. [They’re] our resting thinking faces,” she laughs.
“[Theatre] brings me to this place now, talking into a black abyss of not being able to see much, but feeling this beautiful audience.”
While the audience for Stories About My Body is mainly female, men attend too and have shared how emotional it made them.
“It’s a celebration of having ‘a’ body, and also, especially with childbearing, birthing and rearing, men are so completely and beautifully part of that story. I’ve had some amazing feedback from men. I think it goes beyond, hopefully, being a female show.”
She wrote it at Waihī Beach in 2021, where her family has had the same 1970s bach since she was a preschooler.
It’s a place she goes when she needs to be “thoroughly creative”, and she will perform in Waihī for the first time on October 26 when she brings the show there.
In planning the show, she tells the story of going for a walk on the sand between the “yellow dairy” and the Waihī Beach Surf Club, nutting out the format like a “mad professor”, ranting and raving out loud to herself.
And then she received a sign.
“I said, ‘Okay, that’s how it ends. What do we think?’
“I looked down, and at my feet, there was this beautiful little rock that looked just like a heart. The universe was like, ‘Yip, we like it’.”
“I was like, ‘Okay, great, I can trust you, Waihī Beach, to tell me whether you like it or not’.”
She pocketed the rock and she still has it.
Fittingly, her show is a heart story.
“This show brings the realisation that your body is not an enemy, but something to marvel at and congratulate.”
The details
- Morgana will perform Stories About My Body during the Tauranga Arts Festival on October 24 and 25 at Baycourt Community and Arts Centre, and on October 26 at Waihī Beach Surf Club.
- The show is R16. Get tickets at eventfinda.co.nz.
- A full programme for the 13th biannual Tauranga Arts Festival (October 19-29) can be found at taurangafestival.co.nz.
Carly Gibbs is a weekend magazine writer for the Bay of Plenty Times and Rotorua Daily Post and has been a journalist for two decades. She is a former news and feature writer, for which she’s been both an award finalist and winner.
