Feet Firmly on the Terrazzo

Dinosaur drama

Expensive dentistry sparkles as suddenly gaping mouths release a collective oooomph which bangs around the auditorium a mini-second before the rows of well-dressed goldfish begin to laugh. The audience had just suffered the collective shock of hearing reality spoken on an Australian stage. The shadowing laughter was their relief at finding it wasn’t serious, they were just being amused. Offstage things change but onstage at the Sydney Theatre Company political timidity always rules. Joanna Murray-Smith’s new play, Fury, startled her audience simply by pretending it was about to discuss something real. Twice it seemed we were moving towards Bankstown 2013 but that was only an unsettling momentary illusion and we went nowhere, for we were securely anchored in the Wharf Theatre at Walsh Bay, safely at rest in a place of lapping waters, conventional ideas and comfortable afternoon somnolence.

Andrew Upton and Cate Blanchett commissioned Joanna Murray-Smith to write a family drama for the STC and, at about 110 minutes, Fury is an hour or two short of being epic. A terrazzo floor has been especially installed for the play. I didn’t notice it at the time but I’m sure it was very good and that Upton directed it with his customary skill, as he did the play. At the back of the stage is a high wall with an open space in the centre. Actors stand frozen in the opening before coming forward to take part in the action—the result is slightly slowing and pretentious. The simple, clean, austere and contemporary lines of David Fleischer’s set are misleading, for the play standing on this foundation is a pre-Federation melodrama. A playing formula the late Victorians would have found familiar has been adopted by a modern playwright—another writer might have chosen to turn the familiar inside out and produce something original, but not this time.

It begins with a clichéd opening scene where the main character is interviewed by a young student journalist. It’s an over-familiar and too easy device to give the audience the information they need to follow the action and also to lay clues that a dark secret lurks in the mother’s past. Then comes another story about a family crisis which shows their upright morality which, in the last act, is revealed to be a sham when the dark secret is revealed. In a Victorian play Mum might have heroically, tragically, and feeling terribly misunderstood, glugged down a pint of liquid caustic soda and done a memorable death scene. Murray-Smith didn’t go that way; in Fury the mother chatters on till the play ends.

The play structure is 1890s but the characters are 1990s. Alice (Sarah Peirse) is a successful neuroscientist and Patrick (Robert Menzies) is a less than successful novelist, and they have been married twenty years. He looks like a library discard, she talks like an academic remainder. They have a sixteen-year-old son, Joe (Harry Greenwood) and it is a happy solid family until a young woman, Rebecca (Geraldine Hakewill) the student journalist, comes into their lives and overturns all their comfortable lies. On first sight the women are too familiar—both Peirse and Hakewill look and talk like characters in a Murray-Smith play. Slim, well-dressed, supremely confident, they exchange the show-off wit Murray-Smith writes with the equally familiar gender banter designed for her largely female audiences who can’t tell the difference between Writers’ Festival lectures and theatre: the women could be performing The Two Ages of Joanna. If actresses less physically in the Murray-Smith play mould were cast, the text might have more life. As it is, Alice is a pose, not a part: a throwback to a Women’s Studies lecturer, circa 1994.

Rebecca is interviewing Alice, who has just won an international prize for her neuroscience. The young woman is a PhD student and the interview is for a university newspaper. The fact that Rebecca is studying for a PhD allows her to enter the rarefied and snobbish world that Murray-Smith’s characters inhabit. Very early in the play the text signals what is to come. The programs we have been reading since arriving at the theatre have told us about revolution, Paris ’68, urban warfare and Baader-Meinhof—and also about Sartre, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Baudrillard. When Rebecca reveals that her father, who she never knew, was a policeman killed while on duty we take the clues and suppose Alice was involved in his death. That Alice is a brilliant scientist, and doesn’t make the connection we do or hadn’t made it before when she first heard the girl’s name and saw her age is something to reflect on for the next hour or so until the denouement takes place on stage.

Our use of the internet and television, and especially viewing modern television dramas, have made us all quick at putting together stories and bits of information. Plays in the contemporary theatre are getting shorter but they still carry on as though there is something amazing in seeing an actor wasting our time on stage carrying out boring and unnecessary tasks set by playwrights. Watching actors falling around in amazement at something we worked out an hour before, with clues given by the playwright, is more than an anti-climax, it’s boring. Good television drama treats us as an intelligent audience—and is a lot cheaper to watch than the hundred dollars or so we are charged for 100 minutes of theatre.

We meet the family and the play rolls along. Turmoil ensues when a teacher (Tahki Saul) arrives to tell the parents that Joe and another student have graffitied a mosque. Joe is a sixteen-year-old who makes fun of Al Gore and his parents’ Prius so is obviously capable of anything. This is the first occasion when Murray-Smith shocks her audience. Joe’s reasons for the attack on the mosque are briefly touched on but go nowhere, they are simply treated as being so misguided as not to need either further explanation or rejecting.

The working-class parents of Joe’s friend, who now visit the family home, are responsible for the ideas which will so shock the audience. Bob (Yure Covich) and Annie (Claire Jones) are like the cockney intruders, come to steal the family silver, in an English drawing-room comedy. They are funny for playwright and audience simply because they are working-class. Murray-Smith has created her own distinctive world of smart, wealthy wordsmiths but she is less certain when sketching individuals beyond her own imagination. The uncouth barbarian bogans, Bob and Annie, probably don’t even watch the ABC.

Defending the actions of his son, Toyota factory worker Bob criticises multiculturalism and Muslims, and says we must protect our rights because we were here first. His echoes of Cronulla trigger the gasp heard throughout the audience. It’s a moment of stage history worth noting. David Mamet’s observation is entirely accurate, “A standing ovation can be extorted from the audience. A gasp cannot.” For a moment it seems that finally an elite Australian play is really going to talk about something serious, something the rest of Australia wants the freedom to discuss. But it is a tease. It wasn’t serious. The discussion of the tribalisation of Australia and the growth of a threatening Islamic community remain beyond polite consideration.

Later Annie returns to the stage alone when Alice offers to pay her son’s school fees; his scholarship has been withdrawn after the graffiti incident. Annie rejects the offer. In this elitist worldview the working class can be both funny for what they are and sometimes, in an old-fashioned Left sort of way, noble savages.

Under the bright lights cowardice bows to us. One form of this cowardice we share, another we should denounce. The first is that we are never told what the boys wrote on the mosque. Of course, this is both cowardice and common sense. The fear of Islamic vengeance, which we have been living with since at least 1988 when our bookshops felt too threatened to display Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, has made cowards of us all, for we fear that if the play mentioned the insulting words then the playwright and the actors could soon be in real physical danger, living under police protection, and maybe Emirates would cancel their full-colour advertising on the back of STC programs. In life these boys from an expensive private school would have been thrown to the media and have attracted the hatred of local extremists. The second form of cowardice is that this is not mentioned. The timid play softens reality and the offended imam is confused with the Vicar of Dibley as the happy news is given that he has decided not to prosecute. A police prosecution would have been the very least of their worries.

In the final part of the play what there has been of drama and stagecraft is drowned by talk. Rebecca reappears and reveals that Alice was part of an urban terrorist group called Fury and the carrier of the suitcase bomb which killed her policeman father. Patrick wonders who he had married and leaves home. There is some hair splitting about whether Alice knew the suitcase contained a bomb or fireworks—for some reason this seems important. Joe lies to Rebecca and says his mother didn’t know the case held TNT or whatever and so she doesn’t publicly reveal Alice’s brutal past. Girl betrayed, boy’s life compromised by the lie to protect his mother. Alice talks and talks and play ends. Too much essay, too little theatre.

Up in George Street the memorial has reappeared for the men murdered outside the Hilton in 1978. Not a word in the program about this. Now that we live in a time of predominantly Islamic terrorism, to ignore it and sleepwalk through a realm of pretentious academic dreamtime is bizarre. That Murray-Smith and the Sydney Theatre Company play out a white-private-schoolboy-mosque-daubing fantasy and a white-girl-bomb fantasy as present-day religious zealots spread anger and hatred through parts of suburban Sydney borders on the insane. The actors with their feet on the terrazzo inhabit a confining and rather prissy world. Outside there is a very different Australia, you feel it in the city streets, you see it in our shopping centres, you watch the war in the suburbs on the news, but you won’t see it on our stages. We don’t need staged journalism, but we do need a theatre plugged into the sensibility that runs like electricity through this new Australia.

The performance of Joe was noticeable. The sixteen-year-old was teenagerly boorish, superior, fragile, sensitive and selfish. The opera of adolescent angst was performed by a twenty-six-year-old actor. Harry Greenwood is worth remembering. Robert Menzies may have discovered the secret of eternal middle age, for his program cast photo is identical to the one he used in another Murray-Smith play in 1997, or perhaps it was a subtle reference to the text.

Family footnotes: Joanna Murray-Smith is the daughter of Stephen Murray-Smith, Robert Menzies is the grandson of Sir Robert Menzies, and Harry Greenwood is the son of Hugo Weaving.

Encore

My plump two-volume set of Bernard Shaw’s theatre reviews was first bought from a Danish bookseller in Naples in April 1907. The books have the original owner’s book plate and signature and one Saturday afternoon, as one does, I Googled his name—not really expecting anything would appear, but it did.

Dr Maynard M. Metcalf was an American zoologist who had worked for a time in Naples, and he gave scientific testimony supporting evolution in the Scopes “Monkey” Trial. H.L. Mencken described him there as a “chubby man of bland mien”. When Metcalf appeared on the fifth day of the trial and quietly began answering questions he was so upsetting that the prosecuting lawyers applied to have the jury removed. Then, wrote Mencken, “the show began” and there was “tense drama”:

Then began one of the clearest, most succinct and withal most eloquent presentations of the case for the evolutionists that I have ever heard. The doctor was never at a loss for a word, and his ideas flowed freely and smoothly. Darrow steered him magnificently. A word or two and he was howling down the wind. Another and he hauled up to discharge a broadside. There was no cocksureness in him. Instead he was rather cautious and deprecatory and sometimes he halted and confessed his ignorance. But what he got over before he finished was a superb counterblast to the fundamentalist buncombe. The jury, at least, in theory heard nothing of it, but it went whooping into the radio and it went banging into the face of [prosecutor William Jennings] Bryan.

Shaw would have given him a good notice.