Nowra or never: Don’t Look Away’s Inner Voices

First produced in 1977 at the Nimrod (now Belvoir) Downstairs theatre, Louis Nowra’s Inner Voices was written in the middle of the ‘New Wave’ period of Australian playwriting. Loosely defined as the late-1960s to the early-1980s, the ‘New Wave’ had similar flourishes in all other sectors of the performing arts and society, including film, literature, and music, and sought to bring a distinctly Australian sensibility to their work, as well as an experimentalism borrowed from European theatre, in a bid to distinguish themselves from the inherent Britishness that had been previously maintained. By the late 1970s, “the visionary enthusiasm and common sense of purpose that had characterised the New Wave were wearing off,” as John McCallum writes in Belonging. Out of the growing sense of disillusionment with the lack of unifying cohesiveness amongst their output, came Stephen Sewell and Louis Nowra, whose work was more political, less noticeably Australian, and “more cinematic in dramaturgy.” It is from this context, that Inner Voices springs, and Nowra’s interests and influences are as eclectic as his exploitation of genre and style. 

While we may now be open to the definition of what constitutes an Australian play, in the early 1980s it was still a point of contention that a play set overseas was not inherently Australian. Looking at Nowra’s Inner Voices today – forty years after it first appeared, in something of a mainstage revival – we can see that it is very much an Australian play, irrespective of the fact it is set in eighteenth century Russia. “The first of Nowra’s plays to attract wide attention,” Inner Voices is the story of a young prince, Ivan, who has been locked away in a prison for years, knowing only his name. Following the death of his mother Catherine the Great, Ivan is installed as a puppet-tsar by opportunistic advisers who want power for themselves. But as Ivan’s taste for power and savagery grows, so too do the troubles enveloping his kingdom, until Ivan achieves a savage retribution and comes into his own world.

Earth cry: Stone Soup & Griffin Independent’s Thomas Murray and the Upside Down River

The thing I love most about the Stables theatre is the size of its stage. No other theatre in Sydney that I can think of has a stage quite like it – in size, shape, or layout – and I am constantly amazed at how malleable it is; no two productions ever feel quite the same – sometimes the space feels bigger, sometimes smaller, sometimes grander or more intimate, sometimes even a different shape, as directors, designers, and theatre-makers call upon our imaginations to inhabit and make total the world presented on stage. As you enter the theatre from the stairs, the first thing you notice is the dusty light, a golden glow like the sun, like lamp-light, like candles and canvas; the floor – that precious little diamond space – is covered in planks of timber, time-worn and much-loved, creams and greens and reds and browns and greys, all slotted together in a jigsaw of a stage, like a patchwork quilt, a farm seen from the air. To one side, a ladder and chair; to another, a tyre swing; behind it, a canvas backcloth. And as the lights dim, a figure enters, breathing heavily, covered in dust and mud and dirt, and the space begins to hum with a resonance I have not quite seen in that space for a little while. And it is beautiful.

To th’ wars: Sport for Jove’s All’s Well That Ends Well

Often grouped alongside his ‘problem’ comedies, Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well is a dark and peculiar play that binds itself around the double-edged sword of honour. Written around 1605, its bedfellows are the equally perplexing comedies Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida; the tragedies Othello, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, and King Lear; and the Roman plays Coriolanus and Anthony and Cleopatra. I mention all these plays not as a list, but as an indicator of Shakespeare’s range and stylistic concerns – on the one hand, his tragedies are also bound up around honour and right-action, as are his two Roman plays. His Roman plays also concern themselves with issues of war and battle, conflating it with portrayals of love and family. When viewed in this light, his ‘problem’ comedies – so labelled because their content is neither strictly comedic in the Shakespearean sense, nor are they outright tragedies – don’t seem so problematic at all; rather, they seem right at home, and are in many ways precursory stylistic experiments to what Shakespeare would do in his late Romance period.

Playing at the Seymour Centre, Sport for Jove’s All’s Well That Ends Well is a dark and beautiful stranger of a play, an unsettling “fusion of cynicism and idealism,” as A. D. Nuttall writes. Set in France, it is the story of Helena and Bertram and “a young woman’s overwhelming physical desire for a young man and the extraordinary lengths she will go to have him.” Juxtaposing issues of virginity and a maiden’s honour against the backdrop of war and military honour, it asks just how honourable both of them are when they are pushed to their limits. In typical Shakespearean fashion, neither issue is straightforward, nor are the answers clear-cut or easily resolved. Under Damien Ryan’s direction, this production is clear, crisp, fresh and quite deliciously sensual, albeit in a rather troubling way.