The Floating World

I reviewed The Floating World at Griffin Theatre over at Australian Stage. You can check out what I thought here. (Spoilers: the show is spectacular.)

The Hansard Monologues: A Matter of Public Importance

The Hansard Monologues: A Matter of Public Importance (Merrigong Theatre Company, Seymour Theatre Centre and Casula Arts Powerhouse) runs in Wollongong from July 19-20. Conceived and produced by Peter Fray, written by Katie Pollock and Paul Daley, directed by Timothy Jones.

I didn’t expect to be as affected by The Hansard Monologues: A Matter of Public Importance as I was. The problem for me with a lot of political theatre is that the stories they are telling are too big to relate to: happening on a national, or at least a large, scale, without humanisation. But although this show grapples with some huge issues, the same issues with which Australia’s 43^rd parliament has grappled, it is as much about the people in the parliament as it is the issues. And this becomes a source of frustration: when there is so much politicking at a personal level, how can anything ever get done?

The Hansard Monologues is a work of verbatim theatre, with all the dialogue taken by writers Katie Pollock and Paul Daley from statements made on the record by Australian politicians in Hansard. It is read simply but eloquently and effectively by three actors standing at podiums: Camilla Ah Kin, who reads Julia Gillard and other ALP luminaries, Tony Llewellyn-Jones, who covers the coalition (wearing, fittingly, a blue tie), and David Roberts, who floats between, playing key Independents and Greens, as well as other politicians from both parties. It covers a huge swathe of ground, focusing on, among other things, the debate surrounding asylum seekers, the carbon tax, and same-sex marriage.

The show is framed by the situation in Afghanistan, and this is probably only the significant structural weakness I found with the play. I understood what effect this was supposed to have – how can a nation so fundamentally divided send an army overseas? how can these people talk and argue and talk more when people are dying? – but ultimately, it felt a little tokenistic. Instead of using the Afghanistan situation as a way to divide other policy debates from each other, perhaps it might have been better simply to include it as an issue in its own right.

Otherwise, this is a fantastic work of verbatim theatre, revealing as much about the speakers as it does about the issues. This was particularly true of Julia Gillard, who came across as, to borrow words once spoken of Abraham Lincoln, big enough to be inconsistent. Gillard delivered some cracking speeches in her tenure as Prime Minister and Ah Kin delivers them with a kind of steely-eyed fortitude. Her rendition of Gillard’s misogyny speech was particularly wonderful, as well as Gillard’s parting words: “take your best shot”. By contrast, Tony Abbott and several other Coalition members, especially Christopher Pyne, are revealed as petty political point-scorers, more concerned with winning than doing the right thing. When Gillard was ousted by Rudd a few weeks ago, one of the things that was said was that history would be kind to her. She is not painted in a wholly flattering light in this show, but one cannot help but admire her.

The most affecting part of The Hansard Monologues comes at the beginning, when the focus is put on the back-and-forth debate over asylum seekers. The theatre company could not have known that on this day, July 19, the government would take such a horrific political stance on this issue, in a move which will essentially close Australia’s borders. Viewing this part of the show in this context is visceral – almost literally sickening. The show follows the debate as it goes round in circles, as the parliament argues and argues and argues and takes six week recesses and cannot achieve anything. Their debate is punctuated by tragedies as more and more refugees die, their lives slipping away as the parliament continues to disagree on what should be done with them. It is here that the gulf between the political and the personal becomes horrifically obvious, perhaps never more pointedly than on this day, when in the interests of stopping the boats, the parliament seems to have lost sight of the people aboard them, people who are real, who are desperate, and who are dying. The Hansard Monologues is not partisan on this issue, but treats it with the gravity it deserves. It creates a wholly appropriate sense of frustration in us as audience members as we witness the debate go on and on and ultimately go nowhere – and when the words of Sarah Hanson-Young are shared, outlining the story of Hussain, orphaned by the Taliban and in detention on Christmas Island for many months while the government argued, we are forced to realise that this issue is one that, like the politicians, has a human face.

Hollywood Ending

I reviewed Griffin Independent's Hollywood Ending over at Australian Stage - check it out here. (This play is part of the Rapid Write scheme - from zero to opening in eight weeks - and it's proof that good theatre can be made really fast!)

This Year's Ashes

I saw This Year’s Ashes about a week ago, but I’ve been holding off writing about it because I wanted to make sure I said something meaningful and good. It is a romcom, after all, and romance (which is actually a subgenre of comedy, making the term romcom totally tautological, BUT ANYWAY) is my area of study, so I felt sort of obligated to have Great Insights (tm).

Anyway. So I’ve been holding off writing about it, and trying to think of something meaningful and good to say, and that groundbreaking moment of insight still hasn’t hit me, so I thought I better write about it before it, you know, closes, and I don’t have a chance to talk about how great it was.

Because it is a great, great show. I was really worried going in that it couldn’t possibly live up to my expectations of it, which were high, but it did. In a different way than I thought it would.

Ellen (Belinda Bromilow) is in her thirties, alone in a city where she knows no one, a place that doesn’t feel like home. This Year’s Ashes is about her desperate search for connection – with someone, anyone, and finally, the right one. It’s also about cities and their characters, communities and belonging, and realising that you are not as awful as you think you are.

I have to confess – at the end of the first act, I felt a little wary. Ellen seemed too messed up, too tragic, and I have read enough of both good and bad romance to know that a) this is usually a set up for someone to swoop in and save the heroine, which is a trope I hate, and b) this creates a lopsided narrative, because it’s hard to understand what the swooper is getting out of saving the swoopee. Initially, this is how I felt about Nathan Lovejoy’s Adam (one of the several characters he plays in This Year’s Ashes). I didn’t understand his intense desire to get to know Ellen, because it seemed like Ellen needed to sort out her life first before she could even think about having a productive relationship.

The second act, however, made me realise that my initial assessment was wrong. What This Year’s Ashes does very well is execute what is called in the study of romance (wait a second while I put on my academic hat) the black moment or the point of ritual death. This is the point in a romance where it seems like there is no possibility of a happy ending – that barriers are insurmountable, and that the ending will inevitably be tragic. At interval in This Year’s Ashes, it’s nearly impossible to see how things can possibly end well for Ellen as she is now.

If you go to see this play for a pure love story – girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy again – then you... probably won’t be disappointed, but you’ll be missing the greater romances in this story. While the romance between Ellen and Adam is lovely, it is very conscious of being nascent (if it couldn't be any more obvious, the play ends at the beginning). Unlike a traditional romance, there is no guarantee that Ellen and Adam will live happily ever after together. What is guaranteed, though, is that things will be better for Ellen. And not just because of Adam.

There are three romances in This Year’s Ashes – Ellen’s romance with Adam, her romance with Sydney, and her romance with herself. Her romance with Adam is tied up with her romance with the city – in fact, one could probably date the moment of her falling in love with both to Adam’s New Year’s Eve monologue at the beginning of the second act (which is, by the way, one of the most beautifully evocative pieces of writing I’ve ever had the privilege to hear on stage – it alone is worth going to see the show). Growing throughout, though, is Ellen’s romance with herself. In the theory of the point of ritual death, once the heroine has passed beyond that black moment, she experiences a sort of rebirth. She reclaims life, she reclaims self, and she regains the power to shape her own society. Once she has passed through this point – once the sun has risen, as it does so powerfully in the play’s false ending – she is free to make her own life.

Ellen’s ritual death is a sort of drowning – drowning in a sea of people who do not know her, a city that’s strange and unfamiliar, her only touchstone with reality and community listening to the Ashes on the radio. What I loved about This Year’s Ashes is a trope that is prominent in really good romance. No one saves Ellen. She isn’t dragged to shore. She isn’t picked up by a passing boat marked HMAS Romantic Hero. She isn’t even caught in a fortuitous current that miraculously sweeps her to land.

No. Ellen learns to swim.