“A man can die but once,” wrote Shakespeare, putting the words into the mouth of Frances Feeble, one of Sir John Falstaff’s hapless recruits in Henry IV, Part II. “We owe God a death.”
Of course, some of us not only owe God a death, but the bank a quarter of a year’s salary, our partners another quarter, and our friends various smaller, but nevertheless long-outstanding, amounts.
As for John Bell, the founder and principal director of the Bell Shakespeare Company, he owes God a death as well, and is arguably playing Falstaff for that reason, having heard, perhaps, the same “chimes at midnight” as the bard’s most famous tragi-comic creation. In the case of his Henry 4, in which he plays and nails the role, Bell also owes a significant, unpayable debt to some rather bolder theatremakers than himself, most notably Benedict Andrews and Simon Phillips, without whose productions of War of the Roses and Richard III, respectively, this one would almost certainly not exist.
Andrews’ 2009 production is owed the greater dues. War of the Roses’ spartan second act—in which Ewen Leslie famously gave John Gaden a blowjob while a lone guitarist performed a long, wandering, wounded solo with his back to the audience—is everywhere apparent here. Its content has been cleaned up—there is no fellatio, let alone any ejaculate—at the same time as its setting has been messed up, the empty stage replaced with a more conventionally dressed set. (The multi-coloured wall of milk crates at the back of space is a nice touch: the manner in which the middle part of it is struck down in the play’s opening moments to create an upstage entrance reminded me of the collapsing walls in Simon Stone’s Baal.)
Some of the meaning and metaphor has been drained from the constituent, by now almost iconic elements of the earlier production. But the genealogy is clear enough. As is that which connects the corporate look and feel of King Henry’s regency (David Whitney is excellent in the role) to that of Ewen Leslie’s King Richard in Phillips’ 2010 production, with its deliberate evocation of The West Wing. The result is not as not as good as either War of the Roses or Richard III—it would be hard to top the former—but it is nevertheless very good: it domesticates its influences, but is still elevated by them.
The fact that it was influenced by them at all puts paid, I think, to the ornery criticisms of commentators like Peter Craven who have little time for avant-garde interpretations of the classics. Whether or not one agrees with Craven’s curmudgeonly take on Andrews in general or his grudging appreciation of War of the Roses in particular—I personally think his condemnation of directors who “[allow] the text no life that is greater than the imaginative will of the director” demonstrates a boringly conservative tendency to privilege the single element that is the written play over the totality of the theatrical experience—there can be no doubt that his denunciation of auteur theatre is tantamount to a denunciation of innovation.
More than that, the denunciation suggests a startling lack of understanding about where the mainstream gets its ideas from in the first place, about the trickle-down effect and the gradual ossification of styles and standards over time. As Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) puts it in The Devil Wears Prada:
You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select, I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is […] that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. […] And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.
Which is not to say that the aging matinee crowds who enjoyed Henry 4 were fishing their pleasures from some theatrical clearance bin: I genuinely believe that Bell, co-directing with Damien Ryan, has taken from Andrews and Phillips and delivered not only his best performance in years, but the best-directed of his shows I’ve seen. (It certainly leaves his Orientalist Pericles for dead. I was working for The Australian back when that show ran and my venomous review of it went through four progressively more toothless drafts, at my editor’s insistence, until any reference to racism had been fully sublimated.)
Nor is it to suggest that Benedict Andrews is to be celebrated as some inventor of forms sui generis. Like Barrie Kosky, who preceded him, and Daniel Schlusser and Simon Stone, who emerged a little later, Andrews owes a great deal of debt to contemporary German theatre: to its radical examination of the relationship between form and text, its furious deconstruction of metaphors and its potent reinvention of the same, and its physical, intellectual and emotional intensity. For many people, Thomas Ostermeier’s Hamlet, which headlined the Sydney Festival in 2010, served as a kind of Rosetta Stone, providing them with a more informed sense of what was happening on our own stages, so striking was the familial resemblance.
What it is to say, however, is that even if one doesn’t respect the work of these theatremakers, one cannot but recognise their vital role as the wellspring from which so much of what, over the past couple of years, has trickled down into more and more work by more and more otherwise middle-brow theatremakers. As Bell’s example shows, the point is not that everyone who has been influenced by them is now trying to make shows as alienating or as textually brutal as Kosky or Andrews are occasionally accused of being, but rather that, regardless of a theatremaker’s stated aims and intentions, certain formal strategies, certain ways of making stage images, and indeed certain images themselves, do have a way of making their way from visionary works like War of the Roses and solidly inventive shows like Richard III into even the most genteel type of subscriber bait.
Without “the pretentiousness, the self-conscious barbarism and the scholastic self-preening, the directorial doodling, the courting of dramatic white noise and black holes, the grabbing of crotches, the simulation of fits, the sense of the music of the theatre as a ticking bomb” that Craven described in The Spectator as “my nightmare of what director’s theatre can come to” and in the Sydney Morning Herald as “cultural fascism” and “totalitarian camp”, the deferential, parochial, decidedly middle-brow fare he so stubbornly privileges would simply wither and die, left without a source of ideas that exists outside of itself and its own narrow conception of the form, a tradition deprived of its traditional if often deliberately unacknowledged source of rejuvenating ideas, which is to say, simply, theatre that is better than it.
All of this is perhaps fitting. The idea of debt is in a sense integral to the history plays—an eye for an eye and all that—and to Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 in particular. Prince Hal describes his fast-approaching regency as “the debt I never promised,” a payment owed to blood and history and the crown and, well, a bunch of other things to which, thankfully, most of us in this day and age no longer feel we really owe anything. What is interesting to me, however—what has always made it difficult for me to care much about the character—is the way Prince Hal fails to recognise that he kind of does owe that debt. He may have never promised it, may indeed have been forced to take it on by accident of birth. But he sure is spending his moral capital with a fervour that warrants some kind of accounting. Indeed, while many of us look back with a degree of contrition for things done and said when we knew it all, Hal sees his own conduct in purely strategic terms:
So, when this loose behaviour I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
Highlighted by Matthew Moore’s performance as Hal, which emphasises the young heir’s nasty streak from the first—Leslie’s bored but genuine affection for Gaden is completely absent here, even in platonic form—such conscious deception cannot but strike one as really kind of repulsive. Young Harry’s loose behaviour and drunken antics come across as being more reprehensible for being a performance, not less, and his betrayal of Falstaff all the more unconscionable. (Bell’s reaction to this betrayal has nothing on Welles’s stunned silence in Chimes at Midnight, but then again not much does.)
Or perhaps I’m just envious of Hal’s lack of scruples? What I wouldn’t give to be able to look back on my own indiscretions and to say I behaved the way I did in order to seem more upstanding today. But no, I hurt rather a lot of people in my early twenties, and still feel that surely a reckoning must follow. To my credit, I would like to think, I never acted out of malice, but that doesn’t make me look back on the rap sheet and feel any better about myself. I hurt people out of stupidity, which is stupid; out of uncertainty about my feelings and cowardice in the face of those feelings; and at least once in a weird conflagration of mutual exasperation, misunderstanding, victim mentality, and good old-fashioned self-centredness. I’ve hurt people since then, too, I suppose, and will likely continue to do so, but probably not in quite the same way that I used to: these were the burning villages of my youth, my days of unintentional emotional pillage and destructive, still-adolescent hordes. I borrow this imagery from The Australian’s Melbourne theatre critic, Chris Boyd, who told me over lunch in the wake of the aforementioned conflagration that one looks back from one’s thirtieth birthday and is aghast at the destruction that’s been left in one’s wake. I am lucky that I have been looking back aghast at it since twenty-five or –six, though not even three years of respite have yet managed to dull the sense that one has it coming.
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I think this is a familiar sense among the privileged: the sense of a looming comeuppance. Michael Haneke has made a career of manifesting such middle-class dread: as the polite young psychopaths in Funny Games, say, or in the form of the surveillance footage sent to the family in Hidden, anonymous and not explicitly threatening, but deeply unsettling. Playwright Lally Katz has taken those dreads and sculpted her most famous character out them. The Apocalypse Bear is a monstrous, malignant, impeccably polite creation who I have previously described as “a fantastic by-product of middle-class status anxiety, an avatar of violence and self-loathing in the suburban home. He is what [middle-class neuroses] become when we try to pretend they don’t exist.” In Katz’s Hip Hip Hooray, the bear himself says that he is to the wasteland of the suburbs what flies are to the dung.
Unfortunately, Murray-Smith’s high-handed, overdetermined sense of character and plotting has nothing on Haneke’s precise sense of social anxiety or Katz’s of malignant whimsy. The means by which we reach Alice’s soliloquy are truly laboured. In anticipation of her receiving an award, Alice is approached by a student journalist, Rebecca (Geraldine Hakewill), who gets her to wax both personal and philosophical—which is to say expositional and thematic—while also requesting access to her novelist husband. At the same time, Alice’s son Joe (Harry Greenwood, fresh out of NIDA and very good) has been caught vandalising a mosque. That Rebecca’s access to the family is complete enough for her to find this out from the boy himself—she is pretty much always at the family’s house, even when the adults aren’t—seems unlikely to anyone who has actually worked as a journalist, all the more so as she’s writing for the equivalent of Honi Soit or Farrago rather than The Atlantic or The New Yorker. But Rebecca needs to have such access—reality be damned—because she’s actually not a character at all but a thinly-veiled narrative device: the Ghost of Terrorist Acts Past and the harbinger of Alice’s downfall. To paraphrase Inigo Montoya: “I am a student journalist. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
Having served its role as a right-wing precursor to Alice’s more deadly left-wing crime, Joe’s attack on the mosque is promptly dropped once Rebecca has made her big reveal, and is never really touched upon again. But it’s not the way that the play moves that grates—not the clunky plot mechanics or the too-practiced dialogue, which occasionally reaches the level of cut-rate Woody Allen but just as often sounds like dashed-off op-ed writing—but the way it thinks.
Let me explain what I mean by this. There are plays that make you think and plays that like to think that they’re making you think, but which are actually telling you that it’s okay not to think at all. Fury falls into the latter category: it has been designed to trick the inner-city, upper middle-class subscribers who are likely to comprise its audience into believing that they have had their most deeply-held convictions challenged. In fact, it goes to great lengths to placate those subscribers and to convince them that their convictions are basically sound. Any suggestion in the play’s early scenes that the playwright is serious about examining the gap between the rhetoric of liberal-left privilege and the material reality of that privilege is very quickly dashed upon the rocks.
For one rather telling thing, Murray-Smith has no time for the underprivileged, at least not as anything more complex than theatrical devices. Blue-collar characters like the parents of Joe’s rugby-playing accomplice are initially reduced to comic-because-bigoted stereotypes, caricatures of precisely the sort of people who don’t or can’t attend the theatre to defend themselves. When they are later elevated to a position of moral superiority—still racist, but at least not hypocritical—it’s not much better: the noble prole and the heroic worker, natural-born enemies of the bourgeoisie, are no less crude or reductive stereotypes than that of the buffoonish suburban racist. In any case, the characters are only ever employed to serve as counterpoints to the more fully developed middle-class characters.
Perhaps more importantly, however, Murray-Smith goes to great aims to assure us that Alice is an aberration, the one bad apple, not truly representative of those in the audience. There is something in this of the argument, trotted out every time the stock market collapses, that the finance industry needn’t be reformed, let alone regulated, because it’s not the system that’s at fault but rather a few wayward individuals. The audience need not analyse their own hypocrisy because their own hypocrisy has approximately nothing on that of Alice, former member of a radical cell named the Furies, who knowingly delivered death in a suitcase and now chides her son for an outing with the paint can. How many of them engaged in domestic terrorism in their youth? Approximately none of them. No, they are encouraged to identify, not with Peirse’s Alice, but rather with Menzies’ Patrick, who repudiates this woman he no longer knows, strikes out for the centre, the good liberal. But isn’t there something slightly reprehensible about his past, too, that straight-up shot of bourgeois bohemia, of poverty by choice, that was his gap year trip to France to read Sarte and to try and write a novel on what one suspects was his parents’ dime? It may not be terrorism, but nor is it the sort of privilege that should be left unexamined.
Because the truth is this: Alice’s debt is significant regardless of her act of violence, and it isn’t to the past but to the present. Murray-Smith’s condemnation of the character would cut that much closer to the bone—and what good is condemnation unless that’s where it’s cutting?—had the character never killed someone. The most challenging moment of the play is a scene between Peirse and Menzie at the beginning, before the plot really gets going, in which their sense of self-importance and entitlement is at once both subtle and suffocating: they could have been Martha and George, or Edward and Flora in Pinter’s A Slight Ache, had the playwright been ballsy enough to have left them alone in that room. That’s where the polite young psychopaths might have appeared. That’s where Apocalypse Bear was lurking.
Speaking of Katz’s Apocalypse Bear, he makes his most recent appearance in Stories I Want to Tell You in Person, the playwright’s one-woman show—or rather one-woman-and-a-bear show—which finally opened at Belvoir in April after Katz fell sick on what was supposed to be opening night.
In a way, this piece, too, is about debts and promises: there is the play that is promised to the company that commissions it—this one’s central conceit is that it is not strictly the one the writer was meant to deliver—but also the promises that writers make to themselves. Throughout Stories I Want to Tell You in Person, Katz conducts conversations with her own pre-recorded voice, which she refers to as her subconscious, but which is actual fact is the hyper-conscious, hyper-observant, slightly ruthless side of herself that makes its living mining reality and writing about it. It is to this omnipresent figure—picture Donald Duck’s devilish side appearing over one shoulder without the angel appearing over the other—that Lally makes the promise that all writers make to themselves at one point or another: I will sacrifice love and happiness to my work.
As professionally profitable as such trade-offs can be, they rarely result in a happy individual. (Think of Phillip Roth’s recent pronouncements on fiction: “I don’t want to read it, I don’t want to write it, and I don’t even want to talk about it anymore. I dedicated my life to the novel. […] At the exclusion of nearly everything else. It’s enough!” Yeah, that’s healthy.) Katz understands this, of course—I think it helps that making theatre, unlike writing a novel, is a collaborative act that doesn’t really allow you to exclude everything and everyone else from your process—and in the end argues that the writer owes the rest of the self as much as the rest of the self owes the writer: a little happiness, here and there, in return for the years of shovelling fuel into the ever-dying bonfire of the muse.
The piece can occasionally feel a little like a joke for insiders: Katz not only talks at length about her recent plays, which not everyone is guaranteed to have seen, but also enlists as characters industry players like Belvoir’s artistic director Ralph Myers, its former associate director Simon Stone, and Stories I Want to Tell You in Person’s director Anne-Louise Sarks. As someone who has been following these careers for years, and who knows several of those mentioned personally, it makes for an entertaining experience. I have history with the Apocalypse Bear, too—I saw Gareth Yuen play him in The Fag from Zagreb, Katz’s contribution to the portmanteau production Melburnalia in 2007, and interviewed the playwright herself about the character prior to Brian Lipson’s turn at the bear-suit in the MTC’s production of the Apocalypse Bear Trilogy in 2009—and I knew what it meant for the playwright to say goodbye to him, to watch them waltzing together beneath a mirror ball. The only thing my plus-one had to go on was what the show itself had told her, which wasn’t much. For her, Stories I Want to Tell You in Person was certainly charming enough, elevated above industry gossip by the sheer force of Katz’s personality and above a well-written stand-up comedy routine by Sarks’ effective use of space and light. It’s just not necessarily something that she would have been happy to have paid good money to see.
We didn’t pay good money to see it, of course. We didn’t pay good money to see any of the shows mentioned above. And so, finally, from the debts of the writer we transition to the debts of the critic: to the unspoken contract between the theatre companies that dole out the media passes and to the members of the media in who accept them as their right.
One of my few non-financial debts is thus owed to the good people at the Griffin Theatre Company, who have recently sent me along to two plays: Duncan Graham’s Dreams in White, about sexual relationships and perversion in the internet age, and Tahli Corin’s Girl in Tan Boots, a detective story about those weird personal ads you read in mX on the train.
The shows actually feel like two sides of the same coin: one is interested in the digital realm, the other in the analogue one that is fast being supplanted by it, but both capture something of the effect of the age on individual identity. When our personalities aren’t in the process of becoming more fluid and fragmented—or perhaps because of these very processes— they are often tending towards increased isolation, uncertainty and desperation. Hence Dream in White‘s Michael (Andrew McFarlane), with his separate lives, and Girl in Tan Boots’ Hannah, who goes missing after her female workmates take it upon themselves to pose as her secret admirer: think Sex in the City meets The Killing. (Hannah’s workmates hew so closely to Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha that at times their scenes, while always enjoyable, feel somehow second-hand and their laughs unearned.)
Griffin’s shows are often of a kind that Peter Craven would doubtless approve: the direction is unobtrusive where it isn’t invisible, and the writing, when it’s good, is allowed to shine. But for every amazing show I’ve seen there—Damian Millar’s The Modern International Dead, Lachlan Philpott’s Silent Disco—I would estimate that I’ve seen five or six that I would describe, at best, as weeknight theatre: plays that I would be happy to see between Monday and Wednesday, but that I probably wouldn’t privilege over some of the other companies—or a trip to the movies—the rest of the week.
The bread-and-butter of Griffin is the theatrical equivalent of second-tier television, which has solid enough writing and usually some very good performances, but little that appeals to someone who is interested in the cinematic experience of very best shows. Weeknight productions like Dreams in White and Girl in Tan Boots are certainly well-written and well-performed—Mandy McElhinney, who appeared in the former show, may be best known as AAMI’s Rhonda, but for my money she’s one of the best stage actors around—but they offer little to appeal to someone who is interested in the aforementioned totality of the theatrical experience. Which I suppose shows where my own bias lies.
The Lifted Brow, No. 18, June/July 2013
