Written when he was thirty, as a last attempt at playwriting after a string of plays failed to
garner attention from producers or directors, All
My Sons is the first of Arthur Millers’ four big plays (the others
being Death
of a Salesman, The Crucible,
and A
View from the Bridge, which were all written consecutively). In it, we
can see the seeds of what he would continue to explore in increasing depth and
nuance throughout his career. And although you could perhaps pass All My Sons off as an ‘Ibsenesque’ play,
it is in fact just as devastatingly meaty and dread-full as all his others, and
grapples with issues of morality and ethics, consequences, responsibility,
denial, guilt, and profiteering. And it seems just as relevant now as it did
almost seventy years ago.
Directed by Kip
Williams for Sydney Theatre
Company, and staged within the cavernous Roslyn Packer Theatre, All My Sons is the story of the Keller
family as they wait for their son Larry, currently Missing In Action after
WWII, to come home. But as relationships form, old unhealed wounds and barely-suppressed
secrets are torn open, and the lie under the floorboards of the Kellers’
stability and wealth is laid bare for all to see.
Early on in her study
of Louis Nowra’s work, Veronica Kelly remarks upon the fact all of Nowra’s
work seems to be focused around outcasts or outsiders, the experience of being
an outsider, as well as the physical and psychological landscapes the
characters find themselves in. Written in 1985 and revised in 1989, The
Golden Age is perhaps Nowra’s most pertinent and, certainly, his most
epic play to date. It is also a play that is not afraid to ask the big
challenging questions, even if it knows it does not – cannot – hold all the
answers itself. Inspired by a possibly-apocryphal story about a group of people
found in the Tasmanian wilderness in the late 1930s who were descended from
convict runaways and social outcasts from a hundred years earlier, Nowra’s play
follows this ‘lost tribe’ out of the bush and the myriad repercussion their
arrival brings for them and the two young men who stumbled across their camp. Directed
here by Kip
Williams for Sydney Theatre
Company, this ‘thirtieth anniversary’ production of The Golden Age straddles war and peace, and ranges from Tasmania to Berlin and
ancient Greece,
with skill, integrity, humanity, and passion. In Williams’ hands, Nowra’s play
bursts onto the stage in an earthy, exuberant, and intensely moving way that
defies you to see its true age, and demands we hold it in its rightful place in
Australia’s dramatic and cultural legacy.
I first encountered Kip Williams’ work in
2013, with his production of Romeo
and Juliet for the Sydney
Theatre Company. From the opening moments with the Montague boys swinging
on the chandelier, to Mercutio’s mustard-coloured velvet suit, the revolving
mansion, a tangibly dangerous knife-fight, snatches of Alt-J and Max Richter in
the soundtrack, and the devastating conclusion of empty white beds in a black
void, I was struck by the poetic imagery and exuberance with which it exploded
onto the Drama Theatre stage.
I’ve since had the pleasure to see the
rest of Williams’ work for the STC. From the stark isolation of his Macbeth,
to the aching Chekhovian lyricism of Children
of the Sun, the luscious haunting of Suddenly
Last Summer, and the frenetic kaleidoscope of Love
and Information, Williams’ body of work is nothing short of remarkable.
Following my recent chat with fellow STC
Resident Director Sarah Goodes, I sat down with Kip Williams for an
engrossing and lengthy discussion about the nature of scale, the poetics of
space, the enormous challenges of wrestling Love
and Information to the stage, and the promise of STC’s 2016
season.
