A new play is
always something to look forward to. Griffin Theatre Company knows this, and
has made it their mission to be Australia
Billed as “eloquent,
playful, big-thinking, tender and fierce … an astonishing act of theatrical
invention,” it sounds like it should be the next Babyteeth
(also directed by Flack for Belvoir). But a strange thing happens to Gow’s
play, when it is taken off the page and put on its feet, when it is spoken and
acted. On the page, it is very dialogue-heavy which all theatre is by default.
But on its feet, it is very much the Will Drummond show, almost an
uninterrupted one-hundred-minute monologue, in which the other characters
(actors?) are merely pawns in his chess game, tools to help him tell his story.
Perhaps that
sounds unfair. It’s not meant to be. It is a play very much about parents and
children, about letting go, dealing with the mortality of loved ones; about
moving on but not forgetting. It is about memory, memories, about remembering,
and how sometimes we can’t. It is a play about theatre, about theatre-making,
just as Gow’s Away and Toy Symphony were,
like his Faustus
for Bell Shakespeare in 2011 was a veritable checklist of theatrical styles and
techniques. And, perhaps incongruously, given the above subjects, it is about
Bertolt Brecht, though not to its detriment. Though it’s not surprising,
really: like most of Gow’s plays, it’s not a political play, which is of course
to say it very muchly is a political
play, you just don’t consciously think so at the time. Eamon Flack elucidates
upon this theme beautifully in his Director’s Notes, talking about the
potential decisions and motives behind the implementing of a national
curriculum. Knowledge is power, he says, a kind of light, while a lack of it
leads to ignorance. By the same token, knowledge can also be dangerous, if it
is selectively constructed and interpreted. And so it is with the intentions
behind the national curriculum: it might be seen as a good idea, to make sure
all Australian children are being taught the same thing, but at the same time
it is also a chance to effectively (and selectively) rewrite (retell?) our
national history from a (largely and reprehensively) white point of view. And
this is where Gow’s protagonist, Will Drummond, comes into his own at the
play’s conclusion.
Early on in the
piece, he is approached by a friend of a friend about teaching a group of
students about Brecht and his theories of political theatre. Initially, Will
was going to decline the opportunity, but he later (thankfully) changes his
mind. It’s a unit of study straight out of the senior Drama syllabus, and Gow,
sorry, Will – even Will-as-Gow, or Gow-as-Will, I suppose; there has often been
a level of autobiography to many of Gow’s plays – has a lot of fun with it,
undermining and enriching the students’ experiences in the same breath. In this
glorious final scene we, the audience-as-students, are given a crash course in
Brecht; if you’re not convinced that this is a political play by the end of the
scene, I don’t suppose you ever will be. As Brendan Cowell performs it, it is
the kind of class you wish you could have had at school, the kind of robust and
vaguely rambunctious lecture which picks you up by the scruff of the neck,
shakes you about a bit, and says “This is what I’m on about,” and suddenly
you’re all like “yeah yeah yeah I get it now!”
The action takes
place in a theatre, a meta-theatrical and reflexive decision if ever there was
one. Becoming everything from an airport waiting lounge to rehearsal rooms and
cafés, to hospital rooms, houses, classrooms and just about everything in
between, it is cleverly facilitated by Nick Schlieper’s white-curtained set and
bare wooden floorboards. Perhaps an oblique reference to Brecht’s chalk circle,
it is also a simple device to mask and obscure scene changes, to mark the
passing of time. When coupled with Schlieper’s lighting, it is simple,
effective, unobtrusive and evocative, if perhaps lacking in a touch of the theatrical
magic we’ve come to expect from Flack’s
productions at Belvoir (As You Like
It, Babyteeth, Angels
In America).
From an entirely
structural standpoint, Once In Royal
David’s City is pure Gow. Just as Away
used echoes and motifs from Shakespeare, and Live Acts On Stage
re-visioned the Greek pantheon as behaving as badly as humans, so Gow uses
Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle
and Mother Courage and Her Children
as resonating devices within his own play. We watch as Will’s mother Jeannie,
Courage-like, drags her bags across the tarmac of the airport, painfully
slowly, arriving long after everyone else has left the terminal. We see Courage
(and, indeed, courage) in the way she stands up to the doctor examining her
husband at the beginning, in the way she keeps going in the face of hardship
after hardship, when anyone else might have succumbed to exhaustion and given
up. We see Grusha from The Caucasian
Chalk Circle in the boy’s protecting of his sister on Christmas Day, as the
doctor explains to Will why they cannot operate on his mother, in the way Gail
and Wally wander the corridors comforting those in need. We see glimpses of
ourselves reflected back at us, when we’re at our best and worst, and we are
moved because of it. We are moved because somewhere in this cruel and
unforgiving world there is justice, there is beauty.
While I’ve never
really been a fan of Brendan Cowell’s, his writing, directing or the blokey
waywardness which seems to characterise his performances, he is quite strong
here. And perhaps rightly so, considering he barely leaves the stage for the
play’s one-hundred minutes. There was, though, an anger and frustration, a
forthrightness which didn’t quite sit within the production or Flack’s style; while
Cowell perhaps lacked the warmth and humanity – ‘the heart’ is another way of
saying it, I suppose – which is so often found throughout the rest of Flack’s
work, he was saved by the aplomb and cheeky directness with which he delivered
the final scene. For a character who is the narrator, stage-manager and
director for the telling of his own story, who is the player on both sides of
the chess board, I felt that there was a subtlety and depth to Will Drummond
that had yet to be plumbed, that the role could have been negotiated
differently and more eloquently in another’s hands.
While the rest of
the cast were like pawns in Will Drummond’s – Gow’s – story, each actor brought
a warmth and humanness to their interactions with each other. Harry Greenwood’s
German accent was marvellous, and his Boy displayed a cheekiness and a promise
which I hope we see more of in years to come. Helen Morse as Jeannie, the
Mother Courage figure, was strong and fierce, but not without an underlying
fragility. Helen Buday’s Gail seemed to be a close cousin of her Anna in Babyteeth. The always strong Anthony
Phelan brought a laconic and distinctly Australian flavour to his god-bothering
Wally, and provided one of the most eloquent arguments on the content of the
Gospels that I have ever seen, in barely any words. Tara Morice, Maggie Dence and
Lech Mackiewicz rounded out the cast with honesty, economy and good-humour.
It is Wally’s
speech at the end, the Gospel argument that I just mentioned, that has perhaps
stuck with me most since I saw Gow’s play; it gives a kind of weight to what
I’ve always believed in, and dovetails serendipitously into a book
I read once that said a very similar thing in its own beautiful way (except
without the religious overtones). “The Kingdom is here, within, said Jesus,”
Wally says:
And He only
understood at the end. ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ He said on the
cross. And no reply came and He realised, as He suffered, there’s no reply
because there’s no-one to answer us… The only thing we have is taking care of
each other.
I don’t know if
I’d call Once In Royal David’s City
“beautiful” or say that it’s a beautiful play, because there are bits in it
that don’t quite seem to fit right, like jigsaw pieces that have been forced
together. Big and small, intimate and epic in a single heartbeat, it ricochets
through time and across memories to be about death, Christmas, class,
education, politics and art, in so much that plays and theatre and life are all
‘about’ any one thing in particular; it twists and changes and grows on you the
more you think about it, long after you’ve left the theatre, and while it
wasn’t the play I was expecting, I suppose it kind of is beautiful in its own
way, the same way that you learn to stop worrying and love the world you live
in because the other way lies in darkness and shadow and they are no places for
the living.
Theatre playlist: 8. Once In Royal David’s City, Cambridge
Trinity College Choir
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