Desperately Trying to Deny Reality

Gloria played at the Griffin Theatre from August 26 to October 8.

Guerilla: Le jour où tout s’embrasa
by Laurent Obertone
Éditions Ring, 2016, 425 pages, 20 euros

Gloria may well be a love song to the great women who act on our stages, who we call upon to embody the imaginative state of our nation. But the play is also a symptom of the time we are in—a greedy time, a selfish, self-centred, vain, fearful, frantic, unstable time in which we cling so hard to anything that can make us feel connected to other people, anything that can feel real. Gloria is not a portrait of an actor, it is a portrait of us, one we are desperately trying to deny. Sometimes it takes an Australian on the other side of the planet [expatriate director and writer Benedict Andrews] to see us for what we are becoming. —Lee Lewis

I saw the wrong cast in the wrong play at the wrong theatre. The Gloria I saw was nothing like that. If only I had seen the play Lee Lewis wrote about instead of the one she directed. She also said in her program note:

If I could have one wish it would be to go forward in time about 400 years in order to get enough perspective on this age to know what is actually happening to the world right now … it feels almost impossible to know if we are in the middle of a 200 year war or nearing the end of a 100 year war.

I wonder who those wars are against? Immigrant gangs? Middle East drug lords? Islamic terrorism? Pauline Hanson voters? China? Given the toxic levels of elite and street Australiaphobia washing about us the enemy might be ourselves.

The theatre was the Griffin at Kings Cross. In the bar was a man I hadn’t seen for years. Once, in the days of new cinema and experimental films, he sat in front of me in the upstairs of Bob Gould’s Sydney bookshop for a screening of Peter Weir’s Homesdale. The film was good and it ended. He sat up in his seat, and slowly turned around. I screamed, silently. He had just had his head cut off in the movie. Maybe the man in the bar wasn’t Auntie Jack, but he did look like an older version of Grahame Bond.

Gloria was written by Benedict Andrews. Pierce Wilcox is awful. Marta Dusseldorp shines. The play isn’t great. The theatre is small. Around the stage are video screens—there are always video screens. They show images of violence in the streets, and the characters who occupy a rich, tall apartment building float above it all and occasionally watch the colourful drama of the burning city. It’s not the view from Genet’s Balcony. Move off the fantasy stage and the Griffin itself is a real-life cultural panic room. When we step away from the theatre into Saturday night Kings Cross we are (minus the burning cars) more the play than the play itself.

Back to the awful Pierce Wilcox. He has four different parts. The first time I see him there is a feeling of unease. This is rather good. He is playing a prostitute’s client and immediately he passes, without many words, a warning signal to us that he is not someone to be trusted. Later he demonstrates exactly what shoe fetishists do, which was new to me. There are actors who come onstage looking out at the audience and see only a reflection of themselves. Others, like this actor, communicate and not just with words. He played several other minor parts which passed by until his assistant director late in the play immediately presented a fully formed character, or given the writing, a familiar cliché.

At the beginning, Marta Dusseldorp as actress Gloria came on with stunning full-beam strength. She is the play. A famous actress who might or might not do a comeback in a play about a woman imprisoned and abused by a demented dad, a woman who might explode. All the adjectives have already been used by the Sydney critics so it’s enough to say that Dusseldorp dominates, she shines, and unlike her appearances in the Jack Irish films not all her clothes are removed. At first I am preferring to even watch her back instead of the action which has moved away to another side of the stage. But then the light dims.

It’s not the actors, it’s the play. Dusseldorp is a sword slicing through water. Fellow traveller Lion Feuchtwanger in Moscow in 1937 observed that “the effect of the Soviet Union’s artistic policy is to make the production better than the play. The Soviet Union has a fine theatre but no drama.” Ditto twenty-first-century Australian theatre.

The Griffin comfortably seats just over one hundred spectators, and the audience is divided in two with the playing stage between us. After interval I notice a man sitting on the other side in the front row; any closer and he would have had to join Equity. He’s determined not to look, apart from some brief glances, at what is happening in front of him. He performs brilliantly and at play’s end I applaud lustily.

“My play,” writes the author, “explodes domestic drama into something prismatic, crystalline and kaleidoscopic.” It doesn’t. He’s playing in a toy theatre with cut-out characters. Though he alludes to film influence, Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and Cassavetes’s Opening Night, the staging suggests 1930s Broadway with the director marking out the actors’ movements on the stage floor with a stick of chalk. It’s a real comparison, for scenes are played on top of each other in the same space at the same time. The direction at these moments is more about traffic control than dramatic exposition. The director described a play we never saw; the writer describes a play he never wrote.

Gloria does capture something of our times as we again applaud acting and ignore the lack of content. In France a best-selling novel, Laurent Obertone’s Guerilla, has been disregarded by the cultural gatekeepers. The back cover blurb is accurate: “Civil war was inevitable.” The book recounts the events of three days which destroy France and thrust its unprepared inhabitants into anarchy.

Last year Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission represented the quiet assenting transformation of France into an Islamic state. On ABC television, director and actor John Bell prepared us for a move in the same direction, with a proposal for halal Shakespeare:

I’d be interested to see a production of The Merchant of Venice where you substituted the word “Muslim” for “Jew” and see how that would resonate. If someone abuses you long enough, and spits on you for long enough, you’re going to be like a suicide bomber. If you said to me ten years ago, could you as an actor imagine yourself walking into a school with an automatic rifle and shooting 20 children, or putting on a vest and walking into a supermarket or cinema blowing up anybody, taking as many people as you could? I would have said it was impossible. No human being could do that. Now it’s a daily occurrence. So it’s no wonder Shylock does what he does, and I say good on him. [emphasis added]

Perhaps he had in mind an Australia Council-funded international Bell Shakespeare touring season of the Merchant, with Jessica in a burka, to open in the Bataclan next November.

Obertone’s book is set slightly in the future but already reads like history. The young author behind the pseudonym—rightly concerned about the danger to his family and himself of armed critics—has previously written La France Big Brother and Utøya. The latter is a recreation of the massacre carried out in Norway by Anders Breivik, a murder-by-murder retelling of the killings on the island of Utøya and, rather harder reading, an explanation by the killer. It includes an accurate observation, by Obertone’s Breivik, of the happiness felt by the Left when they learnt that he was what they had always fantasised about, a right-wing extremist: “Horrible isn’t it? And we know, and they know, that I’m speaking the truth.” When they heard the news they prayed that it wasn’t an Islamist. A right-wing extremist made them happy.

The three days recounted in Guerilla begin with frightened and tense officers, and police dog, responding to a call for help from a woman in a high-rise residential building in a typically depressing and dangerous no-go housing estate, a corner of hell run by Islamists and drug gangs. Once again, as every day in real France, the police are set upon. When some are killed an officer fires back. It is the first action in the civil war. The caretaker hears the noises: “She was, like all concierges, depressive, and the member of a society for animal protection.” To the sight of blood and bodies of police and thugs she hardly reacts. When she sees the eviscerated dog she cries and rings the police, a television station, and the Society for the Protection of Animals.

The shock waves of police brutality, not the criminal violence, spread throughout the country. Nationwide anti-police riots break out, as they have done before. This time society cracks. Authority collapses. The army breaks, firefighters are massacred, the police are under siege, hospitals are invaded and wrecked, patients are murdered, drugs looted. Islamic terrorism resurfaces, a plane is shot down over Paris, the inhabitants of a small village are grouped together and burnt alive in a church, main roads are blocked and motorists massacred. Left and Right demonstrate. Public order vanishes. Electricity supplies and communications break down, commerce disappears. The television screens are blank.

Short chapters switch about Paris, picking up and returning to Obertone’s selection of characters. Many of them are unable to breach their personal walls of right-thinking dogmas to recognise reality. Real France is waiting for civil war and some of Obertone’s people sense approaching death, while others don’t know they are about to die.

A young gay man complains to his friends that homosexuals are the forgotten ones of history now that trannies are getting all the attention. Soon afterwards he becomes the centre of interest when set upon by a homo-despising North African mob.

A Muslim terrorist completes his day’s action with a massacre inside Paris Ikea. He pauses for a final selfie pose with a corpse then has his day ruined when he finds there is no longer an internet connection to upload his image.

When murderous mobs come onto the streets the first reaction of the young bobos is to join their multi-culti brothers. But their fantasy world crashes into hateful reality. This time around collaboration, so helpful in the past, doesn’t work. Exponents of living together and anti-racism are set upon by the xenophobic anti-French racists they have helped to create.

Monsieur the President, expecting to distribute the usual hugs and platitudes, criticising the police while expressing solidarity with suburban thugs, visits the site of the initial killings. He would have done better to have headed down to Vichy. Separated from his security detail, he is sodomised and murdered. Obertone is obviously familiar with the events in the Algerian civil war of the 1990s.

Amid the chaos two lost elephants, released from captivity, find each other on the forecourt of a burning Notre Dame.

Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints was an advance warning of invasion. Laurent Obertone’s Guerilla may be too late. The book is dedicated to the Griffin Theatre, John Bell, and all the others: “For those who haven’t understood”.