What a Conservative Might Look Like on Stage

Saturday, July 30. Much publicity and crowds of theatregoers and curious in London for the opening of J.K. Rowling’s play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The following day the rehearsal script was published internationally as an e-book and in a lavish hardback edition. Rave reviews for the play, huge sales for the script. First reviews of the play suggest it could easily run past 2018, when it is scheduled for transfer to Broadway. The play script, the mundane language and brief stage directions give only a slight indication of the miracles and magic that critics and audiences are reporting— a page-flicking lesson in theatre story-telling. Or cut to New York for the buff and bloody American Psycho: The Musical.

In the equally exciting world of Australian theatre, seventy of the country’s leading playwrights were the honoured dinner guests of Carrillo and Ziyin Gantner at the Melbourne Arts Centre. Carrillo Gantner was a co-founder of the Playbox Theatre, which later became the present Malthouse Theatre—another politically correct subsidised Left theatre. Also present was Mitch Fifield, the federal Arts Minister.

Senator Fifield rose up and declared that following the recent Four Corners exposé of the Australia Council it had been decided, as had happened with live beef exports and greyhound racing in New South Wales, to immediately close the Australia Council. Loud cheering from the assembled playwrights. The days of sycophancy and the mates’ dictatorship was ended, he said. More lusty cheers. Fifield firmly stated that the ancien régime arts bureaucrats would be terminated or transferred to the Department of Fisheries (Alice Springs office) and playwrights would receive income support based on the number of tickets they sold to their plays. The response was devastatingly supportive. “And,” he added, “my government will support an investigation into closed-shop trade unionism activities in our theatres.” Standing ovation.

Lacking a Hogwarts spell, it didn’t really go like that. Fifield made a platitudinous pre-dinner address praising playwrights and in response an elderly Left playwright, whose career is unknown outside subsidised circles, “leapt from her chair and yelled that his government had ‘ransacked’ [sic] the arts in its recent funding cuts” (Daily Review). If true, though Fifield lacks any American Psycho attributes, the senator from Victoria should be congratulated for having found anything worth plundering and pillaging onstage in Oz Artz. Her spirited moan, Olive Twist Asks for More, is a greedy example of the self-centred self-entitlement which government funding has cultivated in these Left apparatchiks:

There is not a [Left] playwright in this room that is not affected by the money that has been ransacked from the Australia Council. There is not a single artistic endeavour in the theatre industry [sic] that has not been impacted enormously by that ransacking. You want to honour us? You want to cherish us? Do not take the essential funds away from us!

The open-purse, closed-mind moment of Balzacian bourgeois greed, or social-media-type offensiveness, was cheered and applauded by the gutless intelligentsia in the audience (“Cheers as playwright castigates Arts Minister”, was the ArtsHub headline) prepared to bully a lone man who couldn’t hit back—if he had done so the bullies would have derided him and charged him with sexism, ageism, language-rule infringements they have just dreamed up, and any other ism that would fit on Twitter. And then I guess she tucked into the free food. The attention-grabbing incident is important for so openly revealing a widespread, selfish and intolerant culture of take which prevents a necessary and serious discussion of art policy reform.

The Left pack are quite right in one regard. The Coalition government has no real ideas for reframing arts funding in a serious way, or the will to make constructive and long lasting reforms—but then, neither do they.

David Williamson, whose common sense suggests a closeted conservative in old-Labor drag, gave an after-dinner speech which recycled the usual “What’s wrong with Australian theatre” discussion and once again made sensible yet futile recommendations about writing and staging. They are futile because they ignore the real problem of artistic conformity enforced by the Left’s control and manipulation of state funding and the killing off of commercial theatre by subsidised theatres. Williamson celebrated the narcissism of his business rivals with prose that could have come from Mitch Fifield’s speechwriter:

the great ability of our sharpest playwrights is that they have an extraordinary ear for the social and political realities of the moment, and for the direction of the trends into the future. At their best they can articulate, before the rest of us, what is going wrong or right with our society and why.

For just a moment, in the presence of those seventy playwrights, it was 1972 again, and again, and again. Dear Reader, can you name seventy Australian playwrights? Or the plays they have written? Williamson called his ruminating peers “an endangered species”. That night the only threat to the playwrights would have come from over­indulgence, or anger-induced apoplexy.

So to a play which, almost certainly, not one of the famous seventy could write, truthfully. It’s the best un-staged play of 2016—so far.

Actually, it’s not written yet. Actually, it’s not really a play yet. Actually, it’s a short memoir, a text by Bill Wyndham (very possibly a nom de blog) called “Waleed Aly Broke My Heart” published by Quadrant Online. It introduces itself with the period editorial tones of a silver-screen Wurlitzer organ tremolo: “the love affair of a conservative man and a woman of the left. He loved her for what she was. She rejected him for what her friends might think.” Unforgettable.

Playwrights are constantly advised to write about what they know, which is why modern Australian theatre is so often foul-mouthed, politically dumb, boring, and insulting-Right, conformist-Left. Wake me up when a playwright realises that Andrew Bolt’s White Aborigines Trial was actually a black comedy.

Bill Wyndham’s text, developed as a theatrical narrative, would bring some genuine contemporary reality to our stages. You could do this in many ways including a monologue spoken by the ageing male lover or a two-act drama—a grownups’ Don’s Party. The text is laced with accurate observations of the Left inner-city elite, which spurred some Quadrant Online readers to reveal shared experiences: “That is about 90% of my story. My first reaction was to send it to her. I know it will annoy her, but what the heck”; “Where was it I heard that being a conservative today is like being a homosexual in the 1950s? I am one, but don’t tell people until I know they are one too.”

The interesting figure is not the already familiar closed-minded love object—the species is everyday common on Twitter and in the angry and loony opinion articles of the deflating Fairfax media—but the Man himself, who is really an unknown character. The Man, who describes himself as a libertarian conservative, is the first (would be the first) realistic conservative to appear on an Australian stage. Another Quadrant Online comment suggested the dismayed lover would have been better if he had stayed at the Toorak or South Yarra end of the pool—but the character is very definitely not that clichéd idea of conservative. And the story is not simply a story of the Left–Right divide but the unnatural mating of a Bocon (bohemian-conservative) with a Bobo (bohemian-bourgeois).

A fully staged play could release a fully rounded, and deliciously un-PC, linguistically offensive portrait of the Man, while a monologue could be staged something like this.

There is a blackout and then the morning sound of a cat waking a man. Lights come up as day is breaking to reveal bossy cat and stirring man on a double bed. The Man, a naked fifties, gets up and directs cat to outside door and himself to bathroom. Morning, mature-age bathroom noises—be thankful this imaginary staging has a bathroom door; a similar scene at the Sydney Theatre Company would involve a video camera above the toilet bowl and large onstage screens. Elderly female theatre audiences like a bit of male nudity, and by giving it to them now they might settle down and listen to the words. Young, discreetly phone-filming, female audiences like elderly male nudity because it allows them to feel superior and mocking. This is Australia. The opinions of the males in the audience simply don’t count.

The naked Man returns and puts on his underpants—a clean pair of the sort that suggest he still lives in hope. He also puts on a new dressing gown and it is this that gets him talking, reflecting on his love affair which began when they met at a wedding.

He, recently divorced, was moved by the sight of the woman in a red dress and “an air of pensive vulnerability”. Both players in the game are in their fifties. They talk, he calls her Coral (not her real name), and discovers they have much in common. By the end of the night he is already under the influence: “When you notice the curve of a woman’s neck and think it’s the most exquisite thing, you’re smitten well and truly.” On the horizontal level the developing relationship works well but it collides with some immovable vertical problems—her friends.

In this imaginary staging the Man makes his breakfast. He uses an expensive toaster, bought at a sale, which has coloured bars which change colour as the toast cooks. This is simply for a cheap laugh from a middle-class audience. Things like this always, always get them going. Should the actor feel the tale he is telling is flagging he has only to put on another slice of toast to connect with them. While the toast is cooking the Man explains how he met Coral. With correct timing, toast could pop up when their eyes meet for the first time. Later he will sit in an armchair and from time to time get up to let his cat in, let his cat out.

There are advance warning signs that the affair is cursed. He has a bust of Reagan on his desk. Her front window is decorated with a large brass peace symbol:

a proclamation, as she explained, of her commitment to love, honesty and tolerance. Global warming, wind turbines, the mortal sin of failing to recycle were likewise of her guiding faith. Her friends and circle were of the same stamp and colour, mostly loudly green. Never before had I encountered such a deep concentration of lockstep like-mindedness, nor ever before such intolerance.

Cue a first collision with green friends and an initiation into inner-city speech codes which he violates by explaining that dredging “a strip of sea floor would not prompt the flooding of St Kilda”. Fighting words in Victoria. As they depart the failed encounter she offers a lesson in modern manners clothed in modern anger (perhaps she is a playwright?): “Don’t provoke my friends with your opinions.”

The first act of the relationship expires as Man loses this woman. It’s not only the politics, for the writer admits responsibility for other unscheduled after-divorce tumblings, but they keep in touch, “remaining friends”.

A chance meeting realigns them, although the lady herself has a new but temporary offstage lover. Moving back into her life, he encounters her mother, a retired teacher with frozen Left views whose life is ticking towards a sizeable legacy for her daughter—therefore don’t upset Mum. When alone together, Man and lover talk freely, but in company the walls go up, isolating Man on the outer.

The tale’s last supper drives the story to its final unhappy destination. Again a dinner party, for her friends, and the Man serves canard à l’orange. The narrator seems unaware that that was his first mistake of the night. Inner-city foody obsession is a lustful sexual compulsion and to serve conservative classic cordon bleu suggests probable politically reactionary tendencies. Then, sliding into the already doomed dining conversation, came Waleed Aly, whom they naturally love and the narrator, a man of taste, doesn’t.

With a new wave of Harry Potterism about us at the moment readers may reflect that the Man is clearly Gryffindor, Waleed Aly is Slytherin, and Coral? Perhaps Hufflepuff. The dinner guests, proud of their ridiculously expensive bicycles, are obviously muggles. It isn’t perhaps helpful that the Man, with the friendliest of intentions, reminds his guests that the star had called Islamic head-lopping terrorism “a perpetual irritant”. This is followed by a cry of Islamophobia and the usual politically correct platitudes which conflate current Islamic migrants (occupiers?) and gentle Italian settlers of the 1960s. Conversationally, the narrator leaps from the West Gate Bridge: “‘Perhaps they did have knives,’ I countered, ‘but they weren’t used to genitally mutilate their daughters.’”

Exit dinner party guests early, and love accomplice definitively. In American Psycho: The Musical the blood, a lot of it, comes with knives and tunes. Pulling his new dressing gown around himself the Man on our imaginary stage says, “I just hope she washed the dressing gown I left at her place before re-gifting. I might have left some opinions in the pocket and they could be contagious. Wouldn’t want another love affair ruined.” Final curtain.

A younger reader offered a contemporary view of these antiquated romance rituals:

I got blocked on Facebook by an old flame because I made mention that David Morrison should defend Pauline Hanson from the “Pauline Pantsdown” episode. Apparently, up to that moment, I was considered a “cool and open-minded guy”.

Another reader picked up on the obvious money-and-consumerism obsession of the inner-city elite in the text and offered a few more examples from the “green/Left phrase book”: “I’m such a hotel slut, I love a suite.” “Anything longer than 6 hours and I [public sector employee] always go business class.” “I can’t get anything off the rack, I have to get my clothes bespoke.” “That [restaurant meal] wasn’t bad value at $190 a head.”

Among the comments was one by poet and Quadrant contributor Patrick McCauley, who brought depressing reality into the discussion. He called the text a “magnificent Shakespearean tale of un-requited love (an interpretation of Romeo and Juliet)” but asked, if it were told in the form of a play:

Who would fund it? Who would come to see it? Conservatives do not seem to be part of our “culture”, they do not appear in the stories or the plays or the poems, they do not appear even in the films, haven’t seen any on Neighbours or Home and Away. There are none in the VCE syllabus. Do they actually exist? What do they look like? Or is this a case of cultural erasure?

He is right. Conservatives are excluded from the ABC, yet conservatives turn on to watch Q&A. So-called conservative arts ministers place Left operatives in positions of power and encourage them to fund our cultural enemies. Coalition governments reward the people who hate them for the abuse they turn against them. Conservative politicians smile in photographs taken with people who loathe them, but who accept their money. The old lefty playwright will find a way to keep on getting her money, but young (and not young) conservative artists will be locked out for their lifetimes.

Tip: If you still can’t name seventy Australian playwrights, just follow the money on the Australia Council website.