Un-Astonishing Theatre

Funding Games

As We Forgive is a new play written by Tom Holloway for the actor Robert Jarman. The one-man play was commissioned by Tasmania Performs and their production, directed by Julian Meyrick, opened in Hobart then toured Tasmania as part of the recent Ten Days on the Island Festival before transferring to Canberra for a sold-out season in a theatre festival marking the Centenary of Canberra. As We Forgive is a good example of Australia’s subsidised theatre: not tragically bad, some parts even good, but highly over-praised, handout-dependent, and with cello music.

A striking photo by Peter Mathew was used to promote the play. Robert Jarman, shown from head to knees, stares straight out towards the viewer. Shiny forehead and gleaming dome shaded with the gritty shaved stubble of old man hair. The expression, on the line-shadowed face, is serious. He wears a white suit and white shirt—the photo’s background is white. Right arm hangs by his side. His left hand is in his trouser pocket and the bottom of his jacket is lifted back over his left wrist so that much of the front of his shirt is revealed. About shirt pocket height there is a livid thick line of red and black—what looks like blood oozes out and is starting to leak down the shirt front. The photo, one of the reasons I bought a ticket, turns out to be as misleading as frozen food packaging at the supermarket. The tomato sauce stigmata is certainly in the play but the suit is gone and Jarman, with a spurt of tailored hair growth and neatly razored beard, looks very different. In paying out your money you would be safer with Sara Lee. And the advertised “three morality plays for an amoral age” turn out to be three monologues.

Robert Jarman’s acting is sure and interesting. The eighty-minute performance consists of three talks by different men. These are not major roles—just chats to the audience—but Jarman is alive on stage. A short time later I’m in a Singapore kopitiam and a kid walks up to order his food. Even as he stands still there is movement in his hands which twitch about even in the relative stillness of his posture—he’s very alive or he’s the amphetamine king of Singapore. And I think of Jarman, who also did this as though his characters were tingling with life. The actor has a surprisingly light tone of voice and at times it seemed an adolescent was trying to escape the oldie carapace. Beards make lousy actors and Jarman’s gave a confusing impression of sameness to his three characterisations. The stage design was simple: chairs forward and three screens of changing photographic images behind. And to one side cellist Anthony Morgan performed a composition by Raffaele Marcellino. Nice people who do theatre like this sort of thing—it’s a classy soundtrack and fills the empty spaces.

The playwriting was commissioned by Tasmania Performs, “an initiative of Arts Tasmania”. The grant for Holloway came out of their annual $200,000 grant from the Tasmanian government. The PDF script of the eighty-minute performance is twenty-six A4 pages long, with lots of white space, and is less than 8000 words. Do writers really need government support to produce something so slight? Tasmania Performs also produced the play. Director Julian Meyrick bills himself as the play’s dramaturge and refers to “the play’s two-year development”. The Hobart season was eight performances, the Tasmania country tour six, and the sold-out season in Canberra (the venue seats 90 people) was for seven: twenty-one performances in five different locations. That’s red-ink theatre—from commission (Playwriting Australia suggests a standard fee of $12,500 for a mainstage play) to tour, a non-subsidised theatre company could not afford to be so generous.

The present way we go about supporting theatre with government funding has created a situation in which playwrights are writing to please the arts administrators who support them—the small audiences they are reaching are of lesser importance. If we changed the way public money is distributed to theatre and rewarded companies and playwrights for the audiences they attracted it would completely change the dynamics of Australian theatre and improve the quality of what is being offered. On all sides of politics we seem locked into the religion of arts funding with committees of peers selecting individuals and groups for what they are going to do, not for what they have achieved. Funding the arts needs a complete rethink.

Consider Tom Holloway’s earlier award-winning play Beyond the Neck, a four-actor play based on interviews with survivors of the Port Arthur massacre. It was presented in a sell-out season in Hobart in 2007. An article on the Australia Council website written at the time headlined it as a “word-of-mouth success story” and explained “how a small company used networking to achieve full house on an empty budget”. A program note for his new play also refers back to that sell-out achievement but does not mention that the Hobart season was for only four performances.

In 2004 Holloway received an Australia Council grant of $10,000 to write Beyond the Neck, a ninety-minute no-interval play. In 2006 he was given $9219 to go to London to attend the Royal Court’s International Playwriting Studio for ten weeks to further develop the script. The worked-on text was given one reading at the Royal Court as part of their Young Writers’ Festival in January 2007. Late in 2006 he was given a further $58,442 by the Australia Council to stage four performances of his play at the Peacock Theatre in Hobart. That production of Beyond the Neck was credited to two groups, Tasmania Performs (that’s state government money) and Argy Bargy, of which Holloway was a co-founder. The production brought in well-known actor Ron Haddrick and a Sydney-based director. If they were charged for the theatre, the theatre management were thanked for their sponsorship, its rental would not have cut deeply into their budget.

The Peacock Theatre currently rents at $250 per day for non-profit organisations and $385 per day for commercial use. The theatre seats 165 people. With only four performances there was a maximum possible audience of 660 people. Seats for this production were advertised at $28 or $18 concession. If all seats were sold at $28 the total box office taking would have been $18,480. Remove GST and supposing the author received a 10 per cent commission on ticket sales, then he would have earned about $1663. If the author had written the play himself and then found a group willing to put it on, this is all he would have made.

The route Holloway had come meant that he had already had almost $20,000 from the Australia Council before a production was planned. Usually amateur or semi-professional plays in Hobart perform for two or even three weeks. Typically local companies use their own money, put on their plays for reasonable-length seasons in an attempt to cover their expenses and even, hopefully, to make a small profit to set aside for their next production. In this instance the Australia Council was spending $58,442 so an author could stage his own play for four nights—there was no mention of the Launceston season of four performances in their funding outline. And with the involvement of Tasmania Performs, more money flowed from the state government.

It is all the wrong way about. Playwrights learn not from writing and rewriting and taking advice from the experts, but from the reactions of genuine, ticket-buying audiences. The present system inflates the role of supposed peers and even instils a sense of arrogance in some writers towards their audiences. The money comes from grants, and plays are written to please arts administrators.

The publicity value of a sold-out season in Hobart and a performance at the Royal Court helped the play, which a positive reviewer of the later Sydney performances stated had felt like a piece of “staged radio drama”. In 2008 it won the Awgie Award (given by the Australian Writers’ Guild) for stage—though probably few if any of the judges would have actually seen it performed on stage—and was presented at Belvoir Street in 2009 and Melbourne’s Red Stitch in 2012.

Holloway’s new play narrowly avoids the radio drama feel—probably more through Jarman’s acting than from the strength of the writing. The best monologue is the first. It is about vengeance, and yet, after all the work done on it, is confusing. It is about a man who had, I thought, said he was talking to us about a murder he had committed but at the end there does not seem to have been a murder. I wondered if I had misunderstood. The elderly man recounts how he has been robbed and beaten by a teenage intruder. He plots to kill the boy but finally when he does carry out his plan the kid collapses in tears and the man leaves him feeling that he has obtained vengeance. Sure, and in the real suburbs the kid and mates would have returned and killed the narrator as they filmed it on their phones or else he would be visited and beaten by the kid’s parent(s). I bought a copy of the script and checked to see why I was confused. I was right, there was no murder at the end, but at the beginning I found the words that got me thinking about murder and found the narrator saying this, “You see before you a man who once committed to the act of murder. I think that is the best way to describe it.” That’s not playing fair with the audience. Surely most, like myself, thereafter treated this man we had just met as a murderer and coloured everything we then learnt about him with shades of red. What had been promised as “movingly thoughtful” simply left me slightly confused.

The eighty minutes pass. It’s far from bad but it’s not interesting, different, or even thought-provoking. A daily dip into the Daily Telegraph is far more inspiring and involving. On a warm Hobart night the packed audience in the small space sent the temperature rocketing and we exited embracing the coolness. The play was quickly forgotten. It isn’t a bad play; the real problem is that it isn’t a good play. Funded by a committee, it feels as though it was written by a committee and that probably is a real danger of state-funded arts. The advice Diaghilev gave Cocteau still holds: “Astonish me!”

Stephen Sewell’s Hate

Even before it begins I’m longing for the end. The play is Hate—Stephen Sewell’s 1988 Bicentenary Commission-funded contribution to the bicentennial. Twenty-five years after its first production the gothic monster has been dug up by Marion Potts and put back on stage at the Malthouse Theatre. The script has been published and my enthusiasm comes from a wild bit of Sewell high camp towards the play’s end. Celia and Michael are brother and sister, John is their father. At this point Michael is attacking his father with an axe:

Michael: [screaming] Die!

[Blackout as the axe falls. Celia is illuminated in a tight spot [sic] as she screams hysterically. Buckets of blood are thrown onto her, accompanied by the sound of heavy chopping.]

Celia: No! No! No!

John: [whispering] My country …

Michael: [screaming] I love you!

[The lights change.]

In case we find the play over the top, or what Sewell calls “a theatrical overstatement”, he refers his audience to the “Joh for PM” campaign “which makes the language of Hate seem positively tame”.

I’m filled with enthusiasm. That Marion Potts, who is also Artistic Director and CEO of the Malthouse, has chosen to direct it worries me a little. She directed the John Bell Lear, the one with the fun fur coats. And though I’m hoping it’s going to be like Carrie, the musical flop based on the Stephen King book which was flooded with blood and is one of the most revered of theatrical disasters, I’m not sure that Potts will have the nerve to give us the full Sewell.

In the theatre the playing space is a rectangular stage of slatted boards almost surrounded by seating. At opposite ends the stage extends into the auditorium along narrow walkways. Actors enter the main stage along these routes while the end spaces are also used for playing scenes, forcing the audience to swivel about, switching their attention from the central area to the distant wings which, in my case, are partly obscured by seating in front of me and completely obscured by seats on the right. Most of the time this is more of a relief than an inconvenience. The main feature of the stage is a large rectangular hole on one side. It has some aluminium lining around the top and also seems to have a chute built into it. It certainly arouses the audience’s curiosity and given its mysterious presence throughout the play it should, even this early in the year, be nominated for a Helpmann Award for the best performance at the Malthouse in 2013.

Potts has her own take on the play, even if she misses some great opportunities the script has for staging a glum bit of high camp. Staging some of the boring chat scenes in darkness was a stroke of genius on her part, though it did seem odd that the characters never commented on the power blackouts. It could have been a great play for Barrie Kosky to improve. It cries out to be quoted. Take the opening scene:

Celia: The shadows are getting longer: it’s almost winter again.

Michael: It always seems to be winter here.

Add in some seagulls and some whirling about by Celia.

Celia: I can smell the sea.

Michael: It’s dying.

[The lights change.]

Sewell tells a family story about a horrible right-wing family with all the wrong politics and filthy rich. The action takes place over Easter at their country home. On the bare stage a few pieces of furniture are used to represent the atmosphere. Over there, near the hole, is a drinks trolley laden with bottles. At one point son Michael (Ben Gurens) is supposed to climb on the top of the house for some reason. Potts has him clamber on top of the drinks trolley and do his scene as voices supposedly below are distractingly piped in from offstage. He is meant to be attaching a wire or rope to something but, as the stage directions say, “the action is irrelevant”. It doesn’t work in the way intended. Although the stage directions say he “is in a mildly dangerous position” I don’t think the author really had in mind either the lurking dangers of the Pimms bottle below or the truly scary threat of the gloomily lurking hole. My imagination fails to fly and I get a bit giggly at the sight of actor perched on drinks trolley.

Anyway, we get introduced to the family members of wife, daughter and two brothers. They talk a lot. Sewell is pretty predictable and we get a bit about their house being built on the site of a massacre of Aborigines in 1838 and that’s the last we hear of that.

Finally John Gleason (William Zappa) makes his entrance. This seems different from the printed script and may be a Potts addition, for it’s very old-fashioned. Long ago in a good Coward play at the old Russell Street Theatre after a nice build-up Frank Thring, as Gary Essendine, entered from centre stage back at the top of a staircase in a silk dressing gown. That was brilliant. Potts has her man enter from over there and walk along the edge of the stage. The lighting lays down a path for him to follow in the gloom. He walks slowly, with some attempt at menace. He then stands at the side of the hole in the floor. He takes off his jacket and light comes out of the hole to illuminate him. Is it Satan? Is it Gina? Is it Hitler? But then he raises his arms in an odd crucified motion. It’s like the landing of a lead balloon. I don’t get it, but then I haven’t heard the dog whistle. This man is bad, really bad, because he runs a business, is a member of the Nationals, wants to be party leader, and wears a cravat. It must be Satan.

The story wanders on. Bad loud background music like American afternoon soap—the sort of thing you never stop and watch when flicking television channels. Glass and papers feed the hole though surely that’s not why it’s there. What can it be for? The real drama in the play is whether any of the actors will forget it’s there and take a tumble. A broken leg may shorten our suffering.

Interval comes at last. It’s a hot day and I get a glass of water from the bar. You can’t even get a free glass of water at the Malthouse without a lecture. There’s a notice near the water jugs: “We support the responsible service of alcohol.”

After interval there are a few less full seats. I take my place and begin itching. I’ve caught it from Michael. Every time he comes on he itches. It’s never the same place and every time he pops up I watch to see where it will be. Oh, he’s a drug addict, we find out at play’s end—after he has axed dad. But then this is acting as I haven’t seen it for some time. Daughter Celia (Sara Wiseman) seems a nice sort of person until she reveals, late in the play, details of her over-active sex life and then suddenly begins acting like a horizontal nymphette in a DeMille biblical spectacular. The mother, Eloise Gleason (Glenda Linscott) acts with overemphasis and exaggerated movements as though the audience is far away instead of being in almost touching distance. One of the serious and interesting mysteries of the play is why she keeps taking her shoes off and walking about barefooted. Michael scratches, brother Raymond (Grant Piro) wears a suit and makes an overlong end speech, and John Gleason hardly shows the charisma of a real politician—even a conservative one.

Several bits of dialogue do touch me. In the list of Gleason’s supposed heinous extreme right-wing views he gets laden with believing in world government. Yet the last person who came out with that was Bob Brown. Then, when Michael rambles on to his father—it even includes a plug for a book by Paul Davies—he talks about the Devil tempting Christ and says that what the horned one offered him was freedom. That’s the only interesting idea in the play.

This has been going on for over two hours and twenty minutes. The end is hopefully not far away. Father sees son going into woodshed. Truly. It’s Cold Comfort Farm. He goes towards woodshed. Lightning flashes at both ends of the stage. The technician pumps up the volume on loud singing. Potts disappoints. No buckets of blood and I don’t even see the murder. And still it goes on. Michael (the killer) comes onstage dragging dead dad in clear plastic bag. Just a few splashes of blood on Michael’s clothes and now finally the hole in the ground gets to do its big thing. Big dramatic stuff this—cue more lighting. Michael drags dad towards hole and pushes him in. The hole, who has been waiting all through the play, swallows him gracefully.

After this there is still another talk scene with Raymond giving a long-drawn-out speech. Nasty right-wing family covered up dad’s death by getting it recorded as a tractor accident. Life goes on and killer son is in drug rehab. Almost there now and Raymond unveils a monument to his dead father but instead of the statue which the script calls for he uncovers a wing chair and sits on it. Not at all as dramatic as the original.

The revival of Hate on the stage of a major subsidised theatre is meant to be a contribution to our present political debate. In the program Sewell presents a statement of his own views that is far more frightening than anything in his play, and representative of the present Left attack on our freedom of speech. There are no mirrors in Leftland:

But, of course, anyone listening to contemporary talkback radio would be aware of the violent undertone of Australian discourse, which continues to be angry visceral rage.

Where did the spite and fury come from? In a world of poverty and war [Sewell lives in Bondi], Australia is the Lucky Country, but somehow overwhelmed by fears of invasion by foreign boat people, robbed and taxed by communist elites, tricked out of their birthright by lying climate scientists, all of whom should be shot or tied up in chaff bags and dumped out at sea, along with their hero Osama bin Laden. Indeed, the level of viciously violent rhetoric, whipped up by demagogues like John Gleason, the fictional patriarch of Hate, has never in my lifetime [he’s sixty years old] been more poisonous, making the play not only as relevant as it was almost twenty-five years ago, but as an important reminder, if we need one, of some of the emotional wellsprings underpinning discourse in this (and not only this) country ready to be exploited by unscrupulous politicians.

In 1988, as Sewell was raking in the loot from the Bicentennial grant and writing Hate, he had little idea that the danger to his authoritarian ideals lay not in right-wing families, the Melbourne Club, or holes in a stage, but from a Sydney North Shore solicitor.

As We Forgive played at the Theatre Royal Backspace from March 9 to 16, and at the Canberra Theatre Centre from April 9 to 14.

Hate played at the Malthouse from February 20 to March 8.