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- Article Title: Up the garden path
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A review of Hannie Rayson’s Two Brothers, first performed by the Melbourne Theatre Company in April 2005. The Sydney Theatre Company is presenting the same production at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, until July 2. It then moves to Canberra’s Playhouse (July 14 to 23).
Not so long ago, Melbourne theatre-goers would say of Sydney audiences, ‘If it moves, they’ll clap it.’ These days, it would seem, Melbourne is the new Sydney. No snobbish snipes at the northerners’ perceived lack of sophistication will wash any longer; such parochial bigotries have been found out. No extensive cultural investigation was required to expose the hypocrisy. A visit to the Melbourne Theatre Company’s recent production of Hannie Rayson’s latest play, Two Brothers, would do. As dud joke followed dud joke, the evidence mounted. As one preposterous scenario begat another in a genre-jumble of farce (though not intended to be farce, I fear) and political thriller (or lame attempt at it), Sydney took on a cultural loftiness I’d never noticed before – and I grew up there and admit to lowbrow parentage. When, at the end of Two Brothers, the audience cheered and applauded, there could be no doubt: the play moved, and they clapped it.
Or rather, it spun, on a revolving stage. This technology usually provides some excitement for an audience in the anticipation of mechanical malfunction. In Two Brothers, on the night I attended, no malfunction seemed likely and we were left to concentrate on the production as it turned and turned like a play on a spit – one that didn’t cook. That faithful old combustion agent, dialogue, should have been burning away, sparking and singeing, especially since politics was the kindling. But the language and wit were too wet, the drama too hollow, to catch fire, blow and blow as the actors might.
For mine, the banal-line-of-the-show award went to: ‘There was a time you found debate healthy.’ But there were plenty of contenders. The audience did enjoy little gags about sailing, grammar schools – any reference to someone attending such a school got laughs of the knowing, in-joke variety – and most favoured of all, a Sydney quip or two, the this-or-that-louse-must-be-from-Sydney kind.
Between scenes, as the stage dimmed and went around and around, television-style mood-music was employed to guide us onward, a kind of candle-light for the ears, designed to make our emotions smoulder away. My old mum, a devoted watcher of daytime soaps, would have been right at home. But she can have it! How can emotions do anything but frost over when presented with such ludicrous dramatic situations as Two Brothers offers under the banner of ‘an examination of Australia’s refugee policy’. I lifted that quote from the Two Brothers playbill, the section that set out Rayson’s career.
In storytelling, coincidence, if handled carefully, can be a fuel that keeps the narrative heading relentlessly towards a dynamic resolution, but in this play it stalls it from the start. A conservative cabinet minister goes to the family holiday house, where his brother, who holds opposing political views to his, happens to have sent an asylum seeker to hole up for a while. This refugee’s family was killed when a boatload of asylum seekers sunk en route to Australia while the crew of an Australian naval vessel looked on. The cabinet minister’s son just happens to have been an officer on that vessel. The cabinet minister stabs the refugee to death in the holiday house – but never mind, he ends up PM.
All that’s fine if you’ve written a biting Dario Fo-like political farce or vengeful piss-take. But on reading the playbill, you’d be convinced Two Brothers was intended as a straight-faced think-piece on an issue widely considered to have brought great shame upon Australians due to the scandalous treatment of asylum seekers by the Howard government – especially its deceit and inhumanity over Tampa, about which the majority of the voting public demonstrated it couldn’t care less at the polls. Playwrights, novelists and poets use real events as a point from which to extrapolate through the imagination all manner of fictions and metaphors for the human condition and societal ills. Writers have been doing this since writing began. It’s their job. But if you’re going to take on a big, current issue, don’t fail it artistically. Not as badly as this. It deserves better than dreary Sydney jokes and the crudities of potboiler plotting.
If I were required to say something complimentary about the play, I’d remark that I was grateful that at least it ended; grateful it appeared to obey some model for propelling the action towards a conclusion. A former television scriptwriter has told me that there’s a ‘rubber-ball method’ for writing for the screen: something to do with keeping a drama’s momentum bouncing along no matter how crudely stereotypical the characterisation or how silly the story. Having a motif of no consequence reappear throughout a work, something incidental for the audience to acknowledge with amusement, is, apparently, part of the ‘rubber ball’. I have no idea if Rayson uses this particular method, but her reappearing motif – references to a wine called Barkers Hill – was rewarded with head-nodding smiles from those around me. Even I latched on to it for something to do.
I would also compliment Garry McDonald. His fiendish Conservative, ‘Eggs’ Benedict, the lead character, is little more than a cartoon nasty in his words and deeds. But there is always McDonald himself to serve the eye and ear well, bounding about the stage, displaying his trademark vocal patterns, head-jerks and grins. He inserts his own energetic personality where personality is left vacant in the role. Nicolas Eadie as Tom, Eggs’s predictably nice-guy, social activist brother opposes McDonald with a sort of anti-energy in performance. There’s a listless, hands-in-your-pockets relaxedness about Eadie that’s always pleasant to watch. Even when he’s getting quite excited, he could be sitting in front of the Coonara with his slippers on. I hope that was the effect he intended and he wasn’t merely bored.
In the Two Brothers playbill, a good many of the pages are dedicated to mini-essays about mandatory detention, temporary visas and the suffering of detainees. We read that Rayson ‘belongs to a generation of playwrights who honed their craft in community theatre, which aimed, in part, to empower communities through a truthful representation of their lives’. We are told the playwright ‘researched in depth’ previous plays, and that research went into writing Two Brothers. Quotes on asylum seeking from Justice Einfeld, Robert Manne, Julian Burnside QC, Philip Ruddock, Bill Hayden and Baxter Detention Centre detainees are published, rooting us in the real world, preparing us for lights up.
On the ‘program and venue information’ page, Rayson cites seven sources and references including David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s Dark Victory (2003), Tony Kevin’s A Certain Maritime Incident (2004) and Robert Manne’s Sending Them Home (2004). Yes, there is a disclaimer, in fine print, that the play is fiction, but discerning audience members could be forgiven for feeling led up the garden path, primed for a fiction spliced tightly with fact. Some may be so puzzled that they wonder if they’ve been the target of a tacky promotional ploy.
Personally, if I were cited as one of those sources and references, I’d be bloody ropeable.
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