Festival Fails to Fire Progressive Passions

IT’S midsummer in Australia and the Somewheres are fighting bushfires. Elsewhere the Anywheres are going to music and gender and arts festivals, and painting nasty signs for Invasion Day. Somewheres and Anywheres are names, suggested by British writer David Goodhart, to indicate the two sides of the great split that divides Western societies. On the left the Anywheres, the elitist cultural gatekeepers, and on the other side the more deplorable rest of us, the Somewheres—“who feel their more socially conservative intuitions have been excluded from the public space in recent decades”.

Before the Sydney Festival, third-time director Wesley Enoch appeared in a lightly viewed publicity video talking about this year’s event while sounding like a Woollahra Liberal politician spruiking a street fair: “We are all part of an intersectional kind of community of sexualities and genders and cultural backgrounds and demographics and the more we accept our differences the stronger a community we are.”

Apart from Sydney there was Mona Foma for music in Launceston and preparations were under way for the later arts festivals in Adelaide and Perth with their attached Left Writers’ Weeks. Brisbane had got in early with their festival in late 2018. Illustrating Enoch’s blissful world of “sexualities and genders” was Melbourne’s rainbow alphabet Midsumma Festival—it included “Gender Euphoria”, a variety program sponsored by Arts Centre Melbourne with “the largest cast of transgender and gender-diverse performers ever assembled in Australia”. In Sydney, exclusively First Nation only, there were pre-Mardi Gras “creative development workshops, pushing the boundaries of Black Kweer Drag” conducted by Moogahlin Performing Arts, an organisation funded by the Australia Council and Create NSW.

This year Enoch made the scripts of five newish Festival plays available online at Australian Plays during January. Enoch describes his Left festival as a “cultural accelerator” and accurately states that “we are not often talking to people who disagree with us”. He knows this with absolute certainty because he programs nothing that would interrupt the monotonous progressive monologue that is passed off as festival culture conversation.

If in performance they were professional, with sophisticated stagings, special effects, music and energetic physical theatre, the play texts themselves were sometimes less impressive and the five pieces suggest a divided artistic community: a Chinese play, two Aboriginal plays, a Sri Lankan play and a Bad Male play. 

A Ghost in my Suitcase by Vanessa Bates was commissioned by the state-subsidised West Australian company Barking Gecko Theatre. The seventy-five-minute family play with mainly Asian actors is an adaptation of an award-winning children’s novel by Gabrielle Wang. This Chinese-Australian fantasy play does not deal with gold-rush Chinese families or ghosts around Bendigo or Ballarat. The feminist ghost-busters story is set in a repressive dictatorship. It begins when twelve-year-old Celeste arrives alone in Shanghai from Australia to be met by her grandmother. She carries a small box: “Mama always wanted to return to China. So, I’m bringing her ashes back. Back to the home of our ancestors.”

Her grandmother’s house has not changed since Pearl Buck might have slept there: “A paved courtyard! There’s a flying bat pattern at each corner. Tiny twisted trees growing from ancient stone pots. And a goldfish pond with strange symbols carved on the side! They look like ancient characters!”

Celeste speaks Mandarin, English and French, which is helpful when she starts discovering innate ghost-busting abilities, passed down the female line, and a French-speaking ghost is encountered in Shanghai’s old French Quarter. He is a dead cook worried about preserving his secret French bistro recipes.

The child has assembled herself as a jigsaw Australian: “I’m half Chinese, like Mama, and half French, like Papa. And all Australian!” Ting Ting, the rather mean orphan girl adopted by Celeste’s grandmother, treats this with scorn: “Half of this, half of that. That just means you’re not really anything.” It is an accusation the play does not explore or contradict.

The commissioned play text has surely passed through many educated hands and will probably be used as a school text. Its lack of even a broad-stroke knowledge of Chinese history is noticeable. When grandmother explains Shanghai’s past, she tells of a period “when China was very weak, so countries like England, France and America decided they would come in and grab a share”. America did not have territory in Shanghai, and to ignore the Japanese invasion is blindness. And Mao? And the Revolution?

As the story progresses Celeste is taken to the old haunted house once owned by her high official great-grandfather. He was cheated out of the house and sent to prison, the family disintegrated and her then young grandmother was forced to become a maid. The villain who took the house is now the ghost they will magically battle and defeat. It is a child-pleasing fantasy story—not quite Harry Potter. The male ghost appears in flowing robes and has long mandarin fingernails. It is very Fu Manchu, not a Mao jacket in sight.

At all arts festivals and writers’ weeks Australia’s history is denigrated. This play, using a fictional Shanghai as a backdrop for storytelling, ignores the present-day Chinese dictatorship and its murderous history. Young Australians need a clear-headed, truthful and accurate knowledge of our great neighbour. On the day of the play’s last Sydney performance, security police in China arrested Yang Hengjun, a writer who lives in Australia by necessity. The question all-Australian Celeste should be asking is, “Grandma, what did you do in the Cultural Revolution?”

And at one point, covered in magic bells, Celeste says, “I feel like a chimpanzee.” If she had wandered into the next play and said that she would have been accused of self-harming racism. 

The Man with the Iron Neck is written by Ursula Yovich and based on an original concept by Josh Bond. In performance the eighty-minute play about indigenous suicide begins with a welcome to country and a list of recent youth suicides. It is presented as physical theatre with athletic movement, stage effects and highly emotional performances.

The text has been skilfully composed as a springboard to launch actor emotions, acrobatics and visual stage effects. Thomas Bradley, who I assume is white, has called Bear, a promising eighteen- or nineteen-year-old Aboriginal footballer, a monkey. Bear breaks the other boy’s nose and then commits suicide. The play references the event in 2013 when footballer Adam Goodes was called an ape by a thirteen-year-old girl. Wesley Enoch says the play is about “indigenous resilience”. The Sydney Morning Herald describes it as “a powerful piece of theatre with a message. It focuses on Australia’s indigenous people but reaches out to the community as a whole.”

The week this play was performed in Sydney, when it collided with Australia Day, there was a huge media storm which originated in the US after a sixteen-year-old Catholic schoolboy, wearing a red Make America Great Again cap, was photographed smiling or smirking in the face of a drum-banging Indian protester. There was international social media fury directed at the boy. This did not subside even when video footage turned the story upside down and suggested the boy was being provoked by the older man. There were calls to kill the boy and his classmates, who were described as “white slugs”.

Then, the following week, still high on their annual intake of Australia Day hatred, Anywheres used social media to hound and abuse a white television presenter and the black politician who supported her when she questioned the platitudes and cover-ups which cover the question of indigenous child suicide.

A real play on youth suicide, stripped of theatrics and show-off acrobatics, could start in a cemetery and allow the lonely dead to speak the truths no one listened to when they were alive: realities Sydney Festival, both its theatre-makers and its audiences, cannot bear to hear. While programming for next Festival season, a companion play on anti-white racism is well overdue. 

The Chat by J.R. Brennan and David Woods (the co-authors are a former parole officer and now “criminal justice activist”, and an established writer)has a twenty-page script that tells us very little, as the ninety-minute performance piece is mainly improvisation between actors, ex-offenders and their audience. This experimental drama has been staged since 2016. Some of the published dialogue is a frighteningly detailed account of paedophilia. 

The Weekend by Henrietta Baird is a foul-mouthed seventy-minute monologue as a woman wanders through Redfern and Waterloo looking for her disappeared junkie boyfriend who has been minding their kids. It reads as Aboriginal HBO and feminist-celebrity-obscenity with Eurydice searching for an Orpheus she doesn’t find. It was first showcased in development at the Yellamundie National First Peoples Playwriting Festival in 2017 and is now presented in this production by Moogahlin Performing Arts.

No mainstream Australian reviewer ever repeats the dialogue heard on all our subsidised stages which is familiar to and applauded by their middle-aged theatre-going readers. As the Twitter-vocabulary, Twitter-punctuation stage monologue begins, Lara has returned to Sydney from Cairns and she catches an airport taxi:

I jump in a cab and this cab seems to be dragging along really slow.

Hurry Up F*** ya

C***

So, I quickly phone to let them know I’m on my way home

The last Sydney presentation of the play was an Auslan performance. 

Counting and Cracking by Shakthidaran Sivanathan is the big Festival play. It begins with a meal for the audience and runs for three and a half hours. For the Anywheres multiculturalism always means food. In Sydney the Town Hall was given a theatrical makeover to resemble a Sri Lankan building. The play was commissioned by the Confederation of Australian International Arts Festivals, with the Sydney and Adelaide Festivals, and staged by Belvoir. It is a four-generation Sri Lankan family story reaching from the island’s civil war into the sanctuary of Australia. Seventeen actors play more than fifty characters. Original languages are spoken, and translations offered. Most of the audience probably remembers little about the Sri Lankan civil war and the critics only became experts when they got home and consulted Wikipedia.

The Sydney-based hero has an Aboriginal university student girlfriend from Yirrkala in the Northern Territory. She self-brands as a “bearer of knowledge” and at one point is homesick: “It’s my nephew’s birthday today. That means my family’s going hunting. They’ll have a big cook up. Crabs plucked from the mangroves. Yams dug up from near the river. Mum sent me a picture of my nephew, getting ready to go spearfishing.” The reality behind this beauty is a community with a tragic record of suicides, where women begged the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children for “a locally-based rehabilitation centre or prison farm to keep young people close to family and homelands”.

Counting and Cracking has been years in the making. Reading the script and navigating around fifty characters without a cast list and notes was sometimes confusing. The play had twenty-five Sydney performances and will transfer to the Adelaide Festival for another nine. Family, love, war and peace, cricket and Australia’s refugee policies must have provided enthusiastic audiences with an after-dining frisson of goodness: nothing here to disturb the tranquillity of conventional Left sensibilities.

The Sydney critics were well fed, entertained and impressed. Time Out: “we certainly won’t see another play like it anytime soon”. Fairfax: “the strength of an arts festival is the opportunity it provides to tell an ambitious tale by voices we rarely hear”. The Somewheres, with television streaming subscriptions and personal contact with work colleagues and the people next door, might not be so struck by the supposed originality. The idea of Australia which emerges is built on funny place names, cricket, refugee confusion, humorous migrants, and not much else. A shorter text exploring Tamil Tiger support-raising in the local Tamil community during the civil war, a topic which is briefly raised, might have produced a far more explosive Australian play.

Reading and not seeing the performance suggests the Festival successfully staged a short-run, entertaining, Bollywood family saga at a Sydney Town Hall prettily dressed for the occasion—and there was food and a band. Perhaps the enthused critics are unused to being entertained in the theatre.

Over three politically correct years, Festival programming has driven away the Somewheres, and the Daily Telegraph reported that box-office takings have plummeted by 25 per cent, from $5.15 million in 2017 to $3.87 million in 2019. On the night before Australia Day the Festival held a burning vigil to lament colonialism. In the light of the roaring flames (in the middle of the bushfire season) Wesley Enoch gave a speech. The conflagration was fuelled with taxpayer dollars, as his Festival burned through $21 million of funding. “It’s a huge subsidy per head,” said Leo Schofield, a previous director. “Few people know it’s even on this year, there’s a dramatic lack of excitement.” Less than one hundred lonely people attended the public opening. The solution is not more government money.

Ten years ago ABC Radio National and the government-funded Australian Script Centre conducted a national poll to discover the Best Loved Australian Plays. When the top five plays were announced during an arts broadcast one participant spoke of the event as “a great journey for us at the Script Centre”.

The top play was a commissioned book adaptation, Cloudstreet, by Nick Enright and Justin Monjo. No one mentioned the number of people who had voted. Australia’s population was then about twenty million and while the Australia Council claims that 98 per cent of us “engage with the arts”, the seven-week national poll attracted 674 participants. Cloudstreet became the Best Loved Play in Australia with fifty-three votes. Last in a listing of the top twenty plays was Bombshells by Joanna Murray-Smith—it received nine votes.

Netflix is for Somewheres. Theatre now is for Anywheres—and even they don’t really always enjoy their diet of contrived, subsidised programming. A twenty-nine-year-old returning Sydney Festival patron suggested, in untypically restrained Festival-stage-talk vocabulary, “My initial impression is that it’s a little bit shit.”