A couple of years ago, for the briefest of moments, I was a bit of an expert on Simon Stone. Which is rather to say that, for the briefest of moments, I had arguably seen more of Stone’s work than any other theatregoer in the country. Well before the 28-year-old wunderkind became Belvoir’s resident director in 2011, and well before his production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof got me to thinking about my own past in Australia’s version of Tennessee Williams’s South, I was there at fortyfivedownstairs on the night he made his grand entrance as a theatremaker with his impressive adaption of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening. I was among those who made the opening-night pilgrimage to that warehouse in Footscray where he doubled-down nine months later with his remarkable waterlogged adaptation of Chekhov’s Platonov. I wasn’t the only person to attend all of these early shows, of course. At interval on the evening of his directorial debut, I took to Flinders Lane with Alison Croggon, and the two of us spent a good ten minutes haranguing each other about the fact that we were witnessing the beginning of something special. But as far as I am aware, I was the only person who happened to be moving from Melbourne to Sydney in the same month that Stone’s Pool (No Water) opened in the former and his Spring Awakening reboot in the latter—the precise moment, in other words, that he began to toggle between the two cities—and thus the only one in a position to see and review both. My double review provided Sydney readers with a much-needed overview of this upstart’s efforts down south, in anticipation of his all-out assault on the north, and Melbourne ones with a dispatch from the frontlines of that assault.
My self-proclaimed expertdom lasted all of five minutes. Before too long, Stone was back in Melbourne, directing B.C. and Thyestes and co-directing 3XSisters, none of which I ever saw. I caught the Sydney shows that I could—The Suicide, The Only Child, The Promise, Baal—but because my feet were firmly planted in one city while he had them planted on either side of the border, it became apparent that the first time I wrote about his work with anything even approaching authority was also probably going to be the last. It was a summing up: a summing up of the early part of his career, a summing up of my time on the Melbourne theatre scene, and a farewell, in its way, to both.
Not that I necessarily realised this, or accepted it, at the time. Indeed, I fought against the dying of the stage lights for a rather long time.
The Argentinean film critic Quintín once said that there are two types of cinephile: the anorexic (“life is too short,” in his words) and the bulimic (“my videotheque is too empty”). The anorexic is the kind of person who looks at a film festival program and says: “I’ve probably got about two movies a day in me this year.” The bulimic says, “If I can jerry-rig this thing correctly, I think I can cram in the whole damned thing.” They wind up with the same handful of happy memories and a few new favourite movies, perhaps, but they get there in very different ways.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a theatrehound who wasn’t ultimately an anorexic. Indeed, when it comes to the theatre, it is almost impossible to be bulimic on any but the most local, atomic level. Cinema travels. The campfire and its accoutrements are harder to lug about the place. Unless you’re the type who is happy to track down filmed versions of every production you miss in one or another city, or who can afford to fly between cities on a whim, then no matter how many theatre blogs you read, or how often you check the online theatre pages of the Guardian or the New York Times, you’re never really going to be across more than one city’s theatre scene on anything more than a superficial level.
Hell, staying on top of a single city’s theatre scene, let alone while trying to write about it, is hard enough unless you’re a professional critic. Alison Croggon used to vocalise it the most: not a month went by, it sometimes seemed to those of us who followed her famous blog, when she wasn’t apologising to people who had invited her to shows that she couldn’t attend, or had attended but wouldn’t be able to review at length, when she wasn’t lamenting the latest illness to have befallen her precisely because she was doing so much work. It was hardly surprising. Time was when January and February were quiet months in the theatre. Time was, too, when the companies would lie low for a while in the wake of the city’s arts festival, as if to give us all a much-needed break, a chance to sleep. No longer. Today there are wall-to-wall festivals. Festivals spawn spin-off festivals, sub-festivals, rival festivals. Festivals run concurrently with other festivals. Sometimes it feels like the culture is hunting you. Leave the city to get a breather? You’ll miss twenty new shows, the arrival of some great new talent, and by the end of the weekend all the companies will have new artistic directors. There is a scene in Stone’s production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof where Jacqueline McKenzie’s Maggie chases after Ewen Leslie’s Brick as the circular stage revolves beneath their feet. Using his crutch as best he can, Leslie limps along—on the spot. This is the theatrehound who hopes to stay on top of his city’s theatrical scene. “What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof? I wish I knew. Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can.”
It goes without saying, I suppose, that, after my arrival in Sydney’s scene, I had attempted, madly, to stay on top of Melbourne’s. When I flew down to freight up my furniture, I crammed in two or three shows. I flew down three weekends in a row to pass judgement on that year’s arts festival offerings. Eventually, obviously, it became impossible to keep up this pace, this expenditure, this lifestyle. If nothing else, trying to keep on top of Melbourne’s theatre scene was preventing me from really getting a handle on Sydney’s, which is another way of saying that my reluctance to let go of my old life was preventing me from getting a handle on my new one. I still went to the theatre whenever I was in Melbourne, but that was less and less, sometimes only once a year. I had fallen off the spinning stage.
Eventually, what happened with Melbourne happened with Sydney, too—only here it happened not because I moved, but because I stopped working for the national broadsheet. When that happened, the complimentary tickets dried up, and while I don’t at all mean to suggest that I was only interested in the theatre when it was free, the fact that it no longer was, paired with the fact that I was very deeply in debt, put the kibosh on my being able to attend everything that was showing. To make matters worse, I moved away from the city for a year.
During this time, Simon Stone staged a run of productions that I never saw: The Wild Duck, Strange Interlude, Face to Face, Death of a Salesman. By the time I entered the theatre to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I knew nothing about Stone’s most-celebrated work (Thyestes, The Wild Duck), nothing about his Belvoir period more generally (including the introduction of copyrighted material like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to his otherwise public domain–heavy repertoire), and really, if we’re being honest with ourselves, nothing about Sydney theatre even more generally than that.
Stone’s production is set on what appears to be the surface of an oversized Victrola. The stage is a large, spinning disc, bifurcated in the play’s first act by a curtain of streamers that hides the back half of the space from view. You can almost hear the pre-emptory crackle of the needle hitting the vinyl when, in the production’s opening moments, the stage begins to spin, and, on its first rotation, an unmanned piano appears from behind this curtain. It disappears behind it again and then, on the stage’s second rotation, emerges once more, now with a pianist, and there is music. A logic of simple accumulation is at work: on each rotation of the disc, another musical element is added: a singing child, two more singing children, a regular Trapp Family Singers, all belting out a traditional, saccharine version of ‘Keep on the Sunny Side’, which was a big hit for the Carter Family in the late 1920s. The song’s lyrics, obviously, are intended ironically: there’s a sunny side to life, all right, but don’t prepare to visit it any time in the next few hours. You’re in Williams country now.
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A lot of the production’s strategies were instantly recognisable to me. Stone has his tics, his tendencies. He tends to differentiate his acts visually, rupturing the world he’s given us in the first when we enter and sit down for the second. In the first incarnation of Spring Awakening, the fortyfivedownstairs version, the ordered nineteenth-century schoolroom of the first act had been overtaken by nature, weeds growing out of the desks, in the second; in Baal, the walls literally fell down around Brecht’s titular character, the whole set seeming to collapse in a single, vertiginous instance, and it started to rain on stage. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, we enter after interval to find that the curtain of streamers lying in discarded piles around the stage, the circular revolve now available to our view in its entirety. Stone tends towards strikingly beautiful (but not always especially complex) visual metaphors that become central formal strategies. In Platonov, that was the shin-deep pool of water in which the action unfolded, which reflected, literally when the light was right, the titular character’s own shallowness. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the near-constant movement of the revolve is a simple literalisation of Maggie’s internal agitation, which causes her constantly to ask that aforementioned question about the cat and the roof. That music of truth starts playing again and the Victrola starts spinning accordingly: it doesn’t stop doing so for the whole act, at least until Maggie makes her final, inevitable lie, which has the singular, rupturing effect—upon both the narrative and the stagecraft—of the needle being torn from the record.
I don’t think this is a perfect production. You can tell that Stone, who made his name and enjoyed some of his greatest successes on the back of works in the public domain and their mutability, is grating a little against the limitations being imposed upon him by copyright law. After his run-in with ICM Partners, the agency that represents Arthur Miller’s estate, last year—Stone cut Death of a Salesman’s ending and they forced him to reinstate it—I don’t blame him for playing it straight. But it does feel a little like he’s merely illustrating someone else’s words here, when that has never really been his way. Like Benedict Andrews and Barrie Kosky—auteurs to whom he is often compared, and whose relationships with their source texts is similarly contentious—he’s always needed complete control of his material. And not only of the stagecraft, either, which is where the strengths of this particular production lie, but of the words, which is where, perhaps, Williams’s play and what Stone is trying to do with it part ways a little bit.
But while the gap between them might feel strange at times, some of the complaints about the production strike me as just plain weird. More than one person has complained about Stone’s decision to trade in the Southern drawl for the Australian one—although usually not before hedging their bets by insisting that they support such changes in theory—and more than one, too, has compared the production unfavourably to the famous movie while reassuring their readers that they don’t like to make such comparisons. Diana Simmonds’ claim that “the South was integral to the movie because it is the foundation of the play’s structure and the family’s raison d’être” misses the point that “the South” is not merely a collection of states, let alone a particular accent, but a state of mind and being that, even though we had no civil war for certain of our states to lose, does have its corollaries in this country. When she writes that McKenzie “cannot use Maggie’s voice and there isn’t an Australian equivalent to find,” I feel like sending her a recording of my mother’s sister, who is Southern not by birth but by temperament. Not only could my aunt make short work of Maggie’s rhythms and idioms, she looks set to one day make short work of The Glass Menagerie’s Amanda Wingfield’s, too. The Australian accent grounds Williams’s language and reveals the deep-seated, in-the-bones sadness inherent in it, which in this country too often overlooked in favour of mere technical ability and pyrotechnic hysteria.
The complaint about the change in accent is related—too closely, in a couple of the reviews—to the one about Stone’s attempt to make the play relevant to us in our own geographically and temporally specific moment. John McCallum’s review in The Australian was the most intelligent I read—namely because he didn’t mention the accents or the film—but even it deigned to make such a comment as this:
Brick is a gay man in denial, closetted [sic] from himself as much as from the world that his family represents. His drinking is represented as being an escape, from the pain of acknowledging what he really wants, into simple oblivion. There was a good deal of truth behind this in the 1950s and there is no doubt that it still happens, but it doesn’t feel very real now.
It no doubt still happens, but it doesn’t feel real? I suspect it feels very real indeed to the people to whom it no doubt still happens. The people to whom it no doubt still happens, of course, are usually those who live outside the cultured, coastal enclaves of the cities. Australia’s South exists in those places that our inner-city theatre critics never visit.
When I was at high school in Mount Gambier, South Australia, I was bullied remorselessly for being gay. I wasn’t gay, as it happened, but I liked books and drama—we studied Williams, naturally—and I didn’t much go in for football or cricket, which meant that I was plenty gay enough. Coincidentally, one of my friends actually was gay, and knew that he was gay at the time. But there was no chance in hell, he told me later, that he was going to come out while he was still at school: the stakes were just too high. This isn’t denial, true, but rather self-preservation. I wouldn’t have come out if I’d been gay, either. All the same, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were members of the interschool football team who were in denial and, living in the G today, still are.
The remarkable scene between Leslie’s Brick and Marshall Napier’s Big Daddy also felt weirdly familiar to me. (Called in at the last minute to replace Anthony Phelan, Napier appeared on stage with his script earlier in the season, but was off it by the time I saw the show and was nailing his performance to the wall.) Was I recalling my own grandfathers’ birthdays—the maternal grandfather’s on the cattle farm at Wattle Range, which was sold after he died to a company that grows blue gums, or the paternal grandfather’s on the farm in Wrattonbully, which was sold after he died to be converted into vineyards? Or was I recalling the time that I visited Hervey Bay with an ex-girlfriend and was introduced to her own Big Daddy and Big Momma, their house like a Southern plantation property on stilts, down to the Williams-esque blown-glass animals on the mantelpiece and the spidery shadows of the willow tree outside that played on the dusty lace curtains each afternoon? Or was it the conversation I had with my own father, one day after the bullying had been especially bad, when he showed his hand by cautiously asking me whether I mightn’t be gay like everyone was suggesting? The second act, with its music of truth playing ceaselessly, recalled the days and weeks after either of my grandfathers’ deaths, though I would be pushing it a little to say that I remembered these periods with much clarity. My maternal grandfather left fifty per cent of his estate to his wife and the other fifty to his son. He had three daughters, who got nothing. My paternal grandfather split his estate evenly between his two sons, despite the fact that he, too, had three daughters. My father and uncle decided between themselves to pool their inheritances and split it evenly between all the children, but my uncle backed out at the last minute and my father wound up splitting his share four ways.
There’s a reason Williams set Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the South and not in Greenwich Village, and that same reason is a more than valid one for setting it in Australia, too. Or at least it is if you can imagine that McKenzie and Leslie’s Australian accents are emanating from, say, Mount Gambier or Tamworth, Port Hedland or somewhere up the Gulf of Carpentaria—somewhere, in other words, that might be beyond the immediate limits of the city in which you’re viewing the play. McKenzie doesn’t struggle with the rhythm of Maggie’s monologues as a result of delivering them in the incorrect accent. She doesn’t struggle with their rhythm at all. You’re simply struggling to hear how good she is for Elizabeth Taylor’s resounding echo. This is a failure of critical imagination, not of the theatremaker’s. Yes, there are problems with this show, but not being as good as an admittedly very good movie isn’t really one of them. Stone didn’t need to present a geographically and temporally specific period piece in order to get at what Williams was getting at. The South is universal because the South is a broken heart.
The Lifted Brow, No. 17, April/May 2013
