Family Affairs

Returned to sender

Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre is conveniently located between after-work drinks and a good night out. Tonight, eighty dollars buys eighty minutes of a new play, a program, and the company of an audience who resemble the congregation for the Sydney (Left) Writers’ Festival. Forget Me Not by Tom Holloway is a co-commission by two self-important theatre companies, Belvoir and the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse in Britain. It deals with the familiar story of the UK child migrant scheme to Australia, as a man in his sixties recovers his past. So, within a neat suburban living room set, meet Gerry (Colin Moody), and his mother Mary (English actress Eileen O’Brien).

In Australia, Gerry suffered through a miserable, brutal and loveless childhood on a Catholic-run farm, and the experience ruined his life and the lives of those close to him. Gerry believed his mother was dead; she believed he had been adopted by a family in Britain and had led a much better life than she could have given him. There is little resemblance between them. She is small, chatty, pleasantly ordinary, and fluffy-haired—a platitude Liverpudlian. He is big, blundering, and often frustratingly incoherent. An alcoholic, his marriage to his late wife had been violent. His daughter Sally (Mandy McElhinney) is unforgiving.

The eighty-minute play moves about in time and goes back to when Gerry meets Mark (Oscar Redding), from the Child Migrants Trust, who tells him that he has a mother who is still alive in Liverpool and offers to reunite them. Father and daughter travel to London, where Mark tells them that they are too late and Mary has just died. Finally there is some sort of uneasy understanding between father and daughter as they prepare to dip their hands into Mary’s ashes and spread them over the grave of Gerry’s dead wife.

As Gerry and his mother never really meet, much of the play is revealed to be fantasy encounters between them. The image we have of Mary, based on these dreams, is shattered when Mark meets her for the first time to tell her that her son is alive, living in Australia, and is coming to meet her. For this scene there is a dramatic change as fluffy-haired, tea-in-cosy-covered-teapot-serving Mary whips off her wig, pulls on dressing gown, fixes oxygen breathing tubes and becomes a hard, mistrustful, angry, sometimes foul-mouthed woman. Eileen O’Brien brings a real person into the room. If this characterisation of the dying Mary only emerged during rehearsals, then it has thrown the original play off balance.

Previously the audience’s emotions were given a workout when Mary explained to her son how their parting had come about: “I came home from work and you were just gone.” It’s an essential moment of the play but it is also untruthful, as this is the fiction talking. We should have heard this from the dying, vitally alive, angry Mary for that might have taken us back closer to the real events, and the real unmarried mother with a bastard son in the early 1950s. Seeing this Mary, who now wants desperately to meet her son, I even wonder if she was pleased to be rid of an inconvenient child back in the 1950s, but that is a direction this play doesn’t go. It is possible this new Mary who we see on stage may not be the character the playwright wrote. Pity if that is the case, for Eileen O’Brien has given her a hardness and truthfulness that could have been used to write a very different play which would have run this one off its predictable ideological tracks.

Holloway’s characters aren’t good on conversation. They exchange words but are speaking at each other. The short script overbalances with meaningful silences, repetitions, scenes without words. For Sally to tell her father that his mother has been found and they are going to see her takes almost six pages of script, the making of tea—which no one drinks—seventeen silent responses, and a freeze by the characters which the author suggests should be held “for a long time”. Audiences are intelligent. When writers wander off like this and get lost in thickets of trivia, impatient audiences, who have read the signposts, are way ahead of them waiting for the play to catch up. Gerry arrives in England and Mark tells him Mary has just died. That’s another four pages—it would have been quicker on Facebook.

When Gerry suddenly kicks a piece of furniture off stage it is violent, unpredictable and exciting. Then, as the stage revolves he does this again and again. But now the drama is gone as it is clear the actor is timing his violence to occur so that the flying furniture hits the back wall and not the audience. At the beginning of the play Gerry looks around Mary’s neat room as she goes off to make tea. There is a single picture in a frame. We have to wait for the end of the play for it to be picked up and described as being a photo of mother and baby son. After her death Gerry takes some of her belongings. There is a small, single-door wooden cabinet, which wasn’t previously thrown off the stage. Earlier Mary was delighted when Gerry described a childhood memory of a blue baby’s blanket. It is less than surprising when the cabinet is opened and out comes the fabled blanket.

Gerry is infected with silences and odd twitches. He has a thing about sitting down. He asks and needs to be told again and again where to sit but there is no hint as to why this is so. Holloway struggles with his working-class characters. He puts together facets without seeing a real man. Even describing his past, Gerry’s marriage appears as nothing more than him doing bad things; the idea of his wife as a real partner simply doesn’t emerge. Once again a writer simply inks his computer with platitudes of bad male behaviour.

Casting Colin Moody released a force of nature, uncomfortable and uncompromising. Instead of commissioning a play to show off Holloway’s talents, Belvoir should have bought a play for Mr Moody. Eileen O’Brien was under-used and her transformation into that so-alive Liverpool woman suggested how much she could have offered if she had been allowed to tell Mary’s story in that voice instead of being kept busy making tea in the fantasy scenes. Supporting players Mandy McElhinney and Oscar Redding were also under-employed. Redding was locked into a role so anal-retentive that I longed for Moody to send him flying off the stage like the furniture. The fault lay in the script, not the acting.

Palm Springs on the Yarra

A glass wall protects us from them. Now, she comes forward and leans against it. With one arm outstretched along the glass she turns her head to stare at us out in the dark. Norma Desmond, in her low security prison, waiting for Max to rescue her in the Isotta Fraschini? No, Robyn Nevin playing a conservative. Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, directed by Sam Strong, is a newish American import about a family secret. It’s a big auditorium, well-made play that makes you wonder why we don’t write this sort of thing for ourselves.

A rectangular box sitting at the back of the MTC stage holds, behind glass front walls and doors, a once fashionable living room. In front of it stretches open space broken by several steps splitting the space into two levels and at the very front is a dark swimming pool—which never gets swum in, fallen into, or cleaned.

It’s almost Christmas at the Palm Springs home of Lyman Wyeth (John Gaden), and his wife Polly (Robyn Nevin). They are Republican-supporting ex-movie people: she was a writer and he an actor until he became a senator and an ambassador under “Ronnie”. Daughter Brooke (Sacha Horler), a wind-up whining liberal, has returned home from New York for the holidays with the manuscript of a book she is about to publish. It’s a family memoir which rips into her bad-politics parents, blaming them for the suicide of their eldest son following his participation in an anti-war terrorist attack in the early 1970s. Also at home is her brother Trip (Ian Meadows), a Los Angeles television producer, and her mother’s flaky, recovering alcoholic sister Silda Grauman (Sue Jones), who has washed up after another personal shipwreck.

Like the Australian cast playing Americans, the conservatives on stage are seen from the outside. By the end of Act One it’s been a ho-hum afternoon of conventional theatre. Early on we got a heavy dose of right-wing versus left-wing banter between the Republican Wyeths and Polly’s loony-Left sister. Dull, predictable, the tired political banter could have come from an ABC public affairs program but more likely fell into the writer’s collecting basket from visiting Left blogs. A single observation stands out when flaky sister says, with conviction, “Your politics are offensive to normal people.” That is probably the most successful idea sold by the Left in the last fifty years. No matter how silly, even crazy the projects promoted by the Left have been, they are quickly made to appear to be things that reasonable people, “normal people”, should think.

Act One plays in the house and forecourt. In Act Two the characters go into the room and shut themselves away behind the glass. For the rest of the play we watch them in their box and listen to their miked voices as though an old-fashioned museum display case has come to life. Outside their container a bluish-grey light plays over the stage. As Christmas spirit drains away the parents find out what is in the book and what their daughter really thinks of them. It’s the usual sort of thing.

And suddenly something remarkable happens. John Gaden turns to Robyn Nevin and says it’s time to tell the truth. On this day, at this performance, it is as though the whole audience has seen the obvious hook the playwright is offering and collectively we have opened our mouths wide and swallowed. Once hooked, we don’t struggle. There is silence; a thousand people are waiting for Gaden to continue. He tells the cast to be seated and begins a monologue. He captivates us entirely. What he tells is simple story-telling, emotional and rather brilliant. Gaden’s performance is calm, moving and sincerely passionate. When I leave the theatre I’m still drunk on his words.

But what has just happened has created a problem for the playwright. The Right father and mother have suddenly become sympathetic. Therefore they have to be converted into nice, “normal”, Left people. How to do it? Father confides that because of what really happened to their much loved son he had been forced to live a lie and pretend to be “like them”—his Republican associates. Goodbye Nancy and Ronnie, and all the Wyeths’ ideals. Now, the playwright says, we can like them. It’s a real sell-out. But hey, it’s just another play at the MTC, let’s not take it too seriously—or we might start wondering why we bother pouring out dollars for this stuff as silent but complicit partners in the political degradation of our culture.

After the big scene we come to the end. Daughter comes forward. Several years have passed and she reads from her rewritten book and tells us what happened next in the family story. It’s a tacked-on happy ending, but after Gaden’s great monologue, who really cares?