Not Quite Marriage Plays

The Poultry Play

Young actress lying on the stage with her legs apart. Young actor lies in front of her. With his hand up her dress he talks about what he is doing, she moans. Not far away from them an elderly woman rises to her feet and, leaning on a walking stick, slowly makes her way to the central aisle and up the stairs to the exit. The Melbourne Theatre Company is looking for a younger audience. The play, by British playwright Mike Barnett, is called Cock.

It’s matinee Wednesday at the Arts Centre. After the usual sort of announcement promising “frequent coarse language, sexual references, partial nudity and simulated sex scenes” an enthusiastic queue snakes through the foyer towards the open auditorium doors. Along the way they pass the seniors’ parking lot—a row of wheelchairs and walking frames in a neat line along a side wall. In Bill Henson black-and-white the image could be a visual metaphor for Australia’s subsidised theatres.

Downstairs in the Fairfax Studio director Leticia Cáceres and designer Marg Horwell have covered the stage in soft, square, white cushions. The actors walk on them, walk around them, throw them. A commissioned song by Missy Higgins provides a drive-time soundtrack and is used in several pointless interludes as the cast move the cushions about. It is a soft, muted setting for a play about competition and strong emotions.

John (Tom Conroy—a name to watch for) is an indecisive twenty-something who acts decisively to terminate a seven-year relationship. He then muddles into the start-up phase of a new love but indecisively returns to old love while still considering going forward to new love. All concerned, plus dumped partner’s father, meet to fight out the case. Pillows get moved around to provide a space for the argy-bargy and feathers, literally, fly. Where the writing calls for strength the director introduces a pillow fight. The broken old relationship is repaired and the play ends with indecisive John as confused, unhappy and annoying as he was 100 minutes before when we first met him. At play’s end Conroy appears for the curtain call with his tragic face still marked by the emotions he has been carrying—he bravely bows to us through his suffering and I clap harder for it may be the afternoon’s best dramatic moment. Happily my applause seems to cheer him up.

The one-act play with an ordinary plot has been an international success. The squabbling lovers in the breaking relationship are a gay couple and the new relationship is a heterosexual one. Like the play’s 1960s counter-culture sexazine title, the gay content seems opportunistic and yet is timidly neutered in its presentation. This afternoon the “cheeky” and “suggestive” piece is playing to the usual gathering of elderly matinee ladies with a seasoning of drama and arts students and gay men. During the season opportunities are advertised for captioned or audio-described performances and a frightening sounding “Tactile Tour”.

John, the only character with a name, breaks with his partner (Angus Grant), then meets and beds the girl (Sophie Ross). Abandoned lover complains that although it’s perfectly fine to love either gender John should not be doing both at the same time. Perhaps he hasn’t seen Nöel Coward’s Design for Living or caught up with the theatre of the 1990s. The promised foul language is within the usual elitist vocabulary rant range which you expect when you buy expensive theatre seats. The irony is that practically the only place you are not subjected to “frequent coarse language” in public places is in a theatre foyer.

The partial nudity is partial, and the simulated sex scene is crude. The first partial nudity is the stripping of the unnamed gay lover down to a pair of striped underpants. The actor revealed an amazing number of large moles on his back and front—if there was some follow-up gay fumbling I missed it. Next partial nudity and simulated sex was heterosexual and excruciatingly uncomfortable and not just because it took place on the floor. The action was accompanied by John’s commentary on what he is doing. Surprisingly the play didn’t have gay activists demonstrating, for it suggested that a bit of practical knowledge of heterosexual plumbing would convert homosexuals—or does it mean that gender isn’t important? In MTC matineeland it was like watching television with your grandparents when suddenly a banal program becomes unexpectedly raunchy.

The ravished girl, in her twenties, has been married and divorced and is now ready to link up with a man coming out of a seven-year gay relationship. Seriously? A long time ago Tennessee Williams worked on a similar theme and produced Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. These are dangerously naive illusions the playwright is playing with: word sex and gender theory without reality. The gay lover is hurt when his partner is unfaithful. That is very understandable but may be a sanitised representation of a gay relationship for a mainstream theatre audience. The gay relationship is being represented as a mirror image of an ideal heterosexual marriage. The unspoken word when discussions of gay marriage are heard is monogamy. Not all gay relationships are monogamous. If it was proposed that any possible legalisation of gay marriages included the words “forsake all others” there might be a rush for the exits.

When the three young actors get together to verbally work out their claims and counterclaims they are joined by deprived male lover’s father (Tony Rickards). He takes his son’s side and argues for the status quo ante and is lambasted by the girl for his 1960s sensibilities and wandering eyes. Despite the humour, passion and tears on stage it was a discussion of property rights, not love.

When John indicated that his perhaps final decision is to return to his gay lover—“Better the devil you know”—there were gasps from the lady audience. Homophobes or drama lovers? Yet they were quiet when shortly after there was a truly obscene moment. John is now unhappily reconciled with his old lover—“I’m your trophy”—and with the relationship definitely on its last legs the partner has a solution to the boredom and stagnation they are feeling with each other. He suggests getting kids. Not a murmur from the audience.

Oscar in St Kilda

Tonight in Acland Street the bars, cafes and restaurants are packed with people, but the theatre is less than half full. Onstage is an untidy room in the Cadogan Hotel on the afternoon of April 5, 1895, and Zak Zavod and Phoebe Cane are realistically acting out a moment of oral sex. This is the beginning of David Hare’s The Judas Kiss—a play about Oscar Wilde: “The stage picture is Renaissance: abandoned white flesh against rich patterns, passion expressed as religious torment.” The walls of the cheap stage set wave a bit as the actors act. If these two bonking servants are meant to suggest the hypocrisy of punishing Wilde for similar homosexual activities it isn’t apparent. In Melbourne this March actors’ clothes fell faster than autumn leaves. Nobody walks out.

Mockingbird Theatre is a relatively new company in Melbourne’s independent theatre scene. It has attracted good reviews for presenting solid text-based productions. This revival of David Hare’s 1998 play was presented at St Kilda’s Theatre Works. The drama is in two acts—hetero coupling opens the first and nude homo the second.

In Act I the libel case Wilde unwisely brought against the Marquess of Queensberry has just collapsed and he is in the hotel room waiting to be arrested and charged with having committed “acts of gross indecency” with young men. Act II is set in a villa near Naples in 1897, after he has served two years in prison.

In this costume drama the clothes were period, but which period was unclear. While female servant went offstage to dress, male servant cheerfully and anachronistically zipped his fly in our direction. Wilde’s opening costume was hardly that of the elegant man who had just been in court, and he would not have been seen dead under the carelessly brushed birds-nest wig inflicted on his character. Wine flowed, and though he predictably called for hock (no seltzer) he was served red, and drank it. When the hotel manager (Soren Jensen) and the previously bonking staff cook a sauce for Wilde’s lobster they do this centre stage and attention wanders from Wilde and Bosie chatting at the side. In a far back corner of the stage is a chair, when an actor sits there he looks as though he’s been exiled to the naughty corner—in Broadmeadows. Direction is by Jason Cavanagh.

Chris Baldock’s Wilde was let down by the wallpaper. His creation, which was attention-holding, need a richer frame, a more imaginative staging. Act II set is barer but much the same as the dull and amateurish Act I. If the first setting had suggested a hotel room there was nothing in Act II to suggest Italy and the Villa Giudice. The black formal suit Wilde wears in the second part is a statement about his new condition. It indicates that despite the scandal he still considers himself a gentleman and is typically making “no concessions to the Mediterranean”. Performance nuances like these vanish without either a naturalistic or more imaginative staging.

Physically Wilde in Act II was Wilde in Act I though Hare’s drama calls for physical changes in the time that lapses between the acts: “His body has grown slack and fat and his face is ravaged by deprivation and alcohol. There is a tension in his movements which is new.” Even in prison Wilde’s hair was described as being thinner, streaked with grey and with a bald patch that had appeared on his crown. But throughout the play Baldock’s Wilde was sat upon by the same ugly, bushy wig.

In Act II naked Bosie (Nigel Langley) is found curled up with naked Galileo (Nores Cerfeda)—while the aristocrat did some sheet wrapping, the nude Neapolitan fisherman pottered about the stage. Though portraying Bosie’s rough trade he could equally have been a naked dentist. Without understanding the English talk going on about him the fisherman invented his own little mini-drama which he played out distractingly as the main story line plunged ahead. If you are going to do nude it would have been more honest to have shown corpulent, syphilitic Oscar naked with the younger man. Wilde’s reported habit of covering his ugly teeth when he talked could also have been picked up for the performance—they had earlier rotted when he was treated with mercury for syphilis.

Nigel Langley’s Bosie was tall, white-hair-dyed aristocratic. The hair was odd, the costumes garish and the accent not top-drawer. Bosie in the drama is a pretentious and arrogant snob but there must also be something in the playing that shows a more rounded personality. As with Wilde there should be a visible change in Act II, he is “no longer radiant with youth”. We need to see what Wilde has found attractive and why he lets himself be influenced by the younger man. The playing needed more, and less, than a bottle of hair dye.

Oliver Coleman’s Robbie Ross, Oscar Wilde’s close friend and later defender, was so stiff and corseted that he could have come to bury Wilde rather than to persuade his friend to flee to France before being arrested. From a young actor it seemed an unnaturally repressed performance. Cavanagh’s direction did not face up to the fact that Wilde and his friends were a group of rather campy queers and, Ross especially—who Hare suggested should have a Puck face and be rather Buster Keatonish, needed to let their inner queens out.

The clichés about the Oscar and Bosie story need a closer look. Though they are always described as lovers, the word does not seem accurate. They were two friends who no longer had an intimate sexual relationship, did not usually live together as a couple, but did assist each other in finding younger sexual partners. On trial Wilde made an emotional and inspired defence of homosexuality with his “Love that dares not speak its name” speech. But what he was on trial for concerned sexual encounters with a variety of male prostitutes and blackmailers. Hare’s Bosie attacks Wilde for not telling the truth at his trials:

You could have defended Greek love! How will history judge you? History will forget you … You will be known for ever as the man who was ashamed to admit his own nature!

Tucked away in the final stages of the play it’s almost an afterthought—it would have made a good beginning.

Cock played at the Arts Centre Melbourne, Fairfax Studio, from February 7 to March 22.

The Judas Kiss played at Theatre Works from March 15 to 22.