Rupert Bombs in Melbourne

♦Rupert played at the Arts Centre Melbourne Playhouse from August 24 to September 28.

♦Savages played at fortyfivedownstairs from August 16 to September 8.

Hay fever season is here and the election campaign is finally ending. Rows of flags at Melbourne Airport carry dismal green-tinged and unflattering images of Rupert Murdoch’s face. His features contort as the flags snap in the breeze. It’s not very cheerful advertising for Rupert, a new play by David Williamson for the Melbourne Theatre Company. The coincidence of opening during the election must have seemed a good omen for a play about the media mogul whose papers and television interests had been annoying the Prime Minister and the authoritarian commentariat. And even before it premiered, showing there is always an opening for another Leftie play, it was selected for theatre festival performances in Washington in March 2014.

MTC ticket buyers were assured the new Williamson play was to be a “maverick theatrical presentation” of “what promises to be one of the most discussed plays of the decade”. Posters and publicity material reproduced the stern green portrait and carried a question-and-answer: “Think you know this man? Think again.”

The matinee audience queue cheerfully for snacks and drinks, politely ignoring vendors of overpriced programs. Bells ring and an amplified port wine voice tells us Ruuuuupert is about to begin. Glasses emptied, ice-cream sticks disposed of, crumbs brushed away, we hurry past the big green grim Murdoch portrait on the wall and descend into the Playhouse. Two ladies sitting beside me perfectly capture the excitement. As we wait, and wait for the play to start, they consult a smartphone which brings unexpected news about race 8, number 9. Ten minutes late Rupert begins.

Enter a sprightly media mogul, Sean O’Shea, texting. The novelty delights the audience. He talks directly to us and, unlike the poster, seems happy and extroverted, though his evil nature is soon revealed. He reads us a Tweet about Tony Abbott: “Conviction politicians hard to find anywhere. Australia’s Tony Abbott rare exception.” A groan is heard from those parts of the audience who enjoy theatre-going in order to groan audibly to show they have correct thoughts. A lone anti-groan protestor applauds so loudly that my palms hurt. Williamson doesn’t include the concluding sentence of the offending Tweet: “Opponent Rudd all over the place convincing nobody.”

Older Rupert, who is to act as the narrator, prepares to introduce a younger Rupert, Guy Edmonds, who will act out his life. A curtain at the back opens, the Superman theme plays, it’s a touching moment, and the actor enters.

This isn’t the advertised play about Murdoch. We have gone back in time to the Phillip Street Revues, La Mama and Nimrod in the 1960s and early 1970s. It’s funny, yet Rupert is the biggest theatrical disappointment so far this season. Williamson hasn’t come up with a drama, he’s produced a smooth, amusing, fast-paced revue; while he talked in publicity material of his great affection for Shakespeare’s Richard III there is no Plantagenet/Murdoch tragedy here. If the blurb and marketing represent what Williamson was aiming for, then Rupert is a failure of nerve on the part of the playwright.

There is nothing new here, and nothing at all about the man that couldn’t be picked up in a quick scan of negative internet essays. The performance doesn’t even seem aware of what’s happening around us, for Murdoch and his newspapers are today’s political news as Kevin Rudd storms about complaining that the media master and his servants don’t love him like they did in the days of “Kevin 07”. We do get some old history but not the recent bits about Murdoch minion Andrew Bolt and the Racial Discrimination Act or the attempt by the Labor government to introduce press censorship—both cases where Murdoch and News Ltd supported free speech and the Left intelligentsia supported illiberalism. Though we are reminded of old and classic tabloid headlines including the London Sun’s “Gotcha!” and the New York Post’s “Headless Body in Topless Bar”—the latter available on T-shirts from the Post—there is no mention of the exciting tabloid covers that have been appearing during the present election. Rupert is a PowerPoint presentation with actors; a biography in search of a playwright. The MTC marketing and promotion seem to have been put together without anyone actually reading the script to see what they were selling.

The revue format works best in an intimate setting and it loses much by being played in a large auditorium where establishing the necessary close bond between performers and audience becomes more difficult. O’Shea does try, and much of his banter is directed towards us, or to individuals in the audience. Director Lee Lewis enters completely into the bouncy revue tradition, only at one point seeming to lose direction. An account of the famous “Gotcha!” headline and the sinking of the Belgrano is accompanied by a large black-and-white projection of a young fearful black soldier. The image stopped the funniness in its tracks and it stayed on the screen as the performance moved on. While there it was impossible to take in or take seriously whatever was being said on the stage.

The team of actors pick up and effortlessly drop different characters: Rohan Rivett, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, wives and children, Reagan, Thatcher, even Billy McMahon and Gorton get a mention or appear on stage. Gough Whitlam is a cartoon Whitlam face. The younger actors may not even know anything about the historical ghosts they are playing. The Packer family are Tribune-era cartoon plutocrats as the actors slap on large bellies and transform themselves into buffoons. It isn’t a way of playing that allows for any subtlety. Though it might work in prancing through the life of a comic figure like Bob Ellis. Williamson’s Ellis, that could be fun.

The script, oddly for a political play, could please both Murdoch enemies and admirers, as the very same words evoke different responses. For Murdoch haters the story illustrated everything bad they knew about the man and his evil ways. Every time he opened his mouth they happily shuddered at the horror and awfulness of his thoughts and deeds. But start your day with News Ltd news and opinion and the same words give pleasure, as common sense is recognised. A political play produced with all the resources of a big brassy subsidised theatre production is aimed at a political enemy but when the Williamson text is fired it makes a funny big noise and suddenly dies. Playing safe, it collapses.

When David Williamson tries to say something serious at the end of the play it looks like a contrived ending to bring the piece to a close. Rupert, standing centre stage, makes remarks about free enterprise and individualism which various righteous characters standing on the sidelines strike down with flaming Left integrity putdowns. As they speak the set around them is stripped by stagehands and then the characters slowly leave until only Rupert is on the bare stage. It’s all rather embarrassing and we even get what seems to be Occupy Wall Street and 1 per cent platitudes from the author’s cut-outs. Solitary Rupert looks at us and says, “I’m not finished yet,” and the blackout closes the performance.

Williamson hopes Rupert will get audiences talking and it does. As we leave the theatre some people—it is Melbourne—are discussing the intimate details of the Murdoch family tree.

Stopping at the ATM

Melbourne theatre and gallery fortyfivedownstairs promote themselves as being “unfunded”. When they staged Do Not Go Gently by Patricia Cornelius in 2010 they did so using an Australia Council Theatre Board grant for $52,663. The money came only after the director did some “research” and found that Theatre Board members had only read the first pages. He resubmitted the text and, surprise, was successful. Cornelius’s new play Savages received $45,810 from the same source. The play was commissioned by the Melbourne Theatre Company and this is its first performance. It is a one-act play which runs for seventy-five minutes in an auditorium which seats no more than 150 people. Patricia Cornelius is on the Literature Board, and though it is not uncommon for members appointed to one board to pick up a grant from another board it does make the Australia Council look like an elitist club for insiders.

Cruising to barbarism

In the central playing space a wide wooden platform slopes sharply upwards towards a railing: it represents the deck and rail of a cruise ship. The entrance to the auditorium is decorated with colourful streamers. There are two blocks of seats and the audience can choose to sit either facing straight on or at one side. Greeting her audience, producer Mary Lou Jelbart explains to them that they about to see “a morality tale”.

With the opening blackout four bare-chested men approach the playing area. The sound effects scream, the room vibrates. In semi-darkness the actors move and gyrate like dangerous, threatening, wild animals. Prologue ended they shirt-up, grab bags and meet up for the cruise of their life. This is Patricia Cornelius’s Savages, and they are her savages. It seems blokey and matey like a XXXX advertisement but, as the program states, this is “the dark side of mateship”. It’s going to get nasty and in the background, though it is never mentioned, is the cruel death of Dianne Brimble. In the prologue moments the four men as savage beasts in this gender wars essay have been treated by writer and director with the same disdain they themselves will later turn towards the female passengers on the ship.

Under Susie Dee’s direction the four actors work together, blending words and movement. Cornelius’s writing uses banal and obscene vocabulary to construct the troubled bonding between the actors. Lyall Brooks, Luke Elliot, James O’Connell and Mark Tregonning are the foursome of late-thirty-somethings who destroy every personal relationship they touch. Mateship, marriage, families are broken and betrayed. The cruise ship offers the possibility of sex, and produces violent, damaging anger when this is frustrated.

At the beginning, as they enter and encounter each other to cries of “mate” and make repetitive noises of recognition, it’s a familiar beer advertisement world of comic Australian male behaviour. The Australian male lexicon Cornelius uses comes from an ocker-for-beginners textbook. Choosing crudities, blokey slang, repetitions and rhymes, the author’s words bounce from actor to actor in lively sharp-mouthed exchanges. Bound in by obscenities and a poverty of anything but the most ordinary of perceptions, their language fixes them in violent and broken lives. Dance and physical movements pad out the text as the four getting-older actors give muscular exhibitions of male display and pride which always point towards the underlying violence on the cusp of taking them over.

A door opens in the floor and the four enter a confined space which is their tiny suffocating cruise ship cabin. Their fantasy of romantic luxury is reduced to a cramped, windowless box. They are born losers in a world of dying and desperate masculinity which has turned bitter and dangerous. The language of hate and loathing they heap on women is brutal and degrading and yet perhaps even more moderate than real language that emerged in the investigation into Dianne Brimble’s death.

This agitprop play of Susan Faludi-influenced platitudes and feminist prejudice is intended to be an incisive seventy-five-minute indictment of male behaviour during a salt-water sexual odyssey: “there have been so many dire incidents in the news about groups of men in teams and clubs on tours and trips that I wanted to take them on”. But not all cruises end in violence. If Cornelius had opened another cabin door in her imaginary liner she would have found women who mirror her broken working-class men.

The barbarism of our society is not confined to a gender or a class. It is equally shared by working-class men and women and even the foul-mouthed intellectual women who opinionate and Tweet bitterness and hatred and yet are welcomed to left-wing writers’ festivals and the ABC. The play itself, while examining barbarism, uses barbarism to entertain. While repulsed by the vileness of these men towards women, the play has depicted these male characters, and expects its analysis to be applied to other male groups, as subhuman “savages” in its title, prologue and during the performance. What her fictional men do to women, the playwright does to them. It’s two sides of the same prejudice.

Cornelius’s “savages” are defined by their language. The audience, a typically sophisticated and well-educated group, laugh at the obscenities. The first laugh comes with the first expletive—one young woman gives an extra loud and unmissable performance. Then comes expletive and echoing laugh; then expletive and then laugh. The obscenities are there to entertain. The director, Susie Dee, offers a program note which includes this observation: “Recently in Australia there has been a rush to dig up the ‘classics’ in order to adapt or reinvent (we might even say fuck with) them.” This is the language of our intelligentsia, and it is part of the same barbarism the play is holding up for criticism.