A decade on, but pain is no easier to handle

The Rocky Horror Show is back at Sydney's Star City but for Kerry Jewel the pain of the last production there still hasn't gone away. TROY DODDS reports...

It was August 15, 1998. Dale Jewel is the Deputy Stage Manager for Rocky Horror, and the Saturday evening performance gets underway as scheduled. Then, just five minutes into the show, tragedy strikes when Dale falls through an open lift well and suffers injuries that would prove to be fatal.

"The whole stage was blacked out for the first five minutes of the show, as per normal," explained Kerry, Dale's father.

"There was a narrator on the front of the stage narrating the opening of the show. At this point there is an open lift well backstage that a castle would come through. In front of that, right on the edge of the open lift well, there was a set of black drapes.

"Dale took off upstage during the blackout and we presume he was heading towards the sound desk. He went through the curtains and fell through the open lift well. The fall wasn't that deep - about 12 feet - but he hit his head on the way down which shunted his brain into the front of his skull."

The accident stopped the show for about an hour and what ensued was a frantic few days, with Kerry and his wife rushing home from London to be by their son's hospital bed. At numerous times during their trip home, they were told by doctors their son had only hours to live.

He ended up living for a week after the accident, but with next to no hope of survival, his parents made a heartbreaking decision to turn off his life support.

"It was the hardest thing I have ever had to do," Kerry said.

"But the truth was that he would have been a terrible mess if he had come through it, and even that was extremely unlikely."

The outpouring of emotion from the industry following Dale's death was huge, with a special tribute concert organised in November of 1998.

A decade on, however, and Kerry still questions whether or not safety has improved behind the scenes of shows. He strongly believes that a lack of safety played a major role in his son's death.

“It is not all sweetness and light backstage in a theatre - people think showbiz is fun and glamour but it's not, it’s hard yakka and it can be a dangerous place," he said.

“When I go backstage of shows - my own and other people’s - I see people doing dangerous things on and off stage. It’s too easy to be hurt or killed - my boy died in the blink of an eye."

Kerry believes there needs to be a stronger and more comprehensive look at safety on major theatrical productions, and he is happy for his son's death to act as a permanent reminder of what can happen when things go wrong.

Still, nothing will help take away the pain of losing a son at the age of just 23, particularly given the future he appeared to have in musical theatre.

At his tender age, he had already worked on countless shows including South Pacific, Hello Dolly, Crazy For You and Me And My Gal.

He got into theatre quite by accident and originally had a dream to enter the RAAF.

"We were watching television one day and he realised that by joining the RAAF he might possibly have to kill somebody, or be killed," Kerry said.

"The terrible irony is that he joined the entertainment industry, and that is what killed him."