Hometown dreaming
What
made, and still makes, Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth
Doll endlessly fascinating to its hometown Melbourne is that
it was about Melbourne at the time. Now, more than fifty years
later, it still fascinates because it is a snapshot of the physical
and psychological make up of this city. I hope that White Whale’s
commissioned suite of five short plays about Melbourne in the
here and now are published and can be seen again and again because,
like the ‘Doll’, the five authors have each represented
a fragment of the psyche of the Melbourne suburbs; any one of
those fragments sure to strike a chord with someone in the audience
at any time.
Tee O'Neill grew up in Ringwood and her 'The Queen
of Ringwood' takes Ibsen's Nora from her stifling life in A
Doll's House and transplants her to an equally stifling life
in Ringwood. Gary and Terri are a couple of teen criminals about
to rob someone at the local Pizza Hut. But Terri wants out of
the dead-end existence and to escape from her patronizing boyfriend.
The themes here, as in all of the plays, are universal.
Even without being told the setting of Kate Holden’s
'Waiting it Out', the first sight of the old wooden chandelier
tells you straight away it is the old Galleon café in St
Kilda. Holden captures the generational attraction of iconic St
Kilda and added a layer of gentle feminism with a beautiful generational
woman’s story. Two mid-life St Kilda regulars are reminiscing
in the Galleon on the night it closed. In comes a teen-aged school
girl, newly fascinated with the social culture (and drug culture)
of the city and later a prostitute, the ugly consequence of that
cultural mix.
It was a coup to enlist writers like Lally Katz
and Ross Mueller. Katz’s piece 'The Fag from Zagreb' in
particular is little gem in her already defining surrealist style.
Set in wealthy Kew a gay teen schoolboy comes home to find his
mother and sister absent and only the "Apocalypse Bear"
(a half human half teddy bear) at home. The Apocalypse Bear fixes
his afternoon snack while the boy chats first online to a suicidal
older gay man in Zagreb then to the bear as though it were perfectly
normal to have an "au pair bear" about the house. Only
when the bear makes sudden comments about the boy’s sexuality
and suggests why the boy's sister is not home yet does a dark
side begin to emerge in the play. Whether she has intended to
or not Katz has turned Donald Winnicott’s theory of psychological
growth from childhood dependence to adult independence and, in
particular the transitional object – the teddy bear being
the most universal - to calm the anxiety of oncoming adulthood,
into a dark fantasy. The bear questions the boy about his sojourns
to the backwoods of Kew and unsettles the boy and the tone of
the play. This ambiguous little two-hander, played in an almost
deadpan naturalism, recalls Patrick White at his best, the sybolism
and subtext are enough to fill books.
'Educating Riah" by Alice Pung is another piece
that captures perfectly the attitudes to an area by its outsiders
as well the attitudes of its inhabitant to each other. Set in
Foostcray it again uses the attitudes of adolescents to makes
its points, this time the attitudes between Chinese and Cambodian
migrants and refugees.
Ross Mueller's 'Being Greg Stone' stretches the
terms of the comission a little. In his play about the CBD he
takes a dig at the "capital city" of the theatre industry.
The entire Australian theatrical establishment is actually the
real-life actor Greg Stone, and a theatre agent is desperately
trying to get her client to be Stone in a job he is too busy to
do himself. It works in performance, anyone who knows the Melbourne
theatre scene will get its jokes and more topical references.
The five writers seem to have not been restrained
by the commission and the five separate plays do not in ant way
feel disparate. Under David Mence's direction they flow into each
other, the actors looking like they hand over to each other in
the brief transitions from one play to the next. The cast take
on several roles each, in some cases very different and challenging
roles across the performance. Like at Red Stitch there is a feeling
that each actor is right for the part they play and, in most instances,
each actor gets to play a serious and a lighter role.
Michael Magnusson
To read more of Michael Mangusson's theatre reviews,
check out his blog at
On Stage (and walls) Melbourne.
