Nick Enright: An Actor's Playwright. (Australian Playwrights, Vol. 12)

Nick Enright Nick Enright An Actor’s Playwright Edited by Anne Pender and Susan Lever Volume 12 in the series AUS...

Author: Anne Pender | Susan Lever

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Nick Enright

Nick Enright An Actor’s Playwright

Edited by

Anne Pender and Susan Lever

Volume 12 in the series

AUSTRALIAN PLAYWRIGHTS Series Editor: Peta Tait

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

Cover Photograph: Deidre Rubenstein, Nick Enright and Andrew Ross in Songs of Love and Desperation, The Tilbury Hotel, 1986. Photographer: Stuart Campbell. Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2460-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents List of Figures Series Editor’s Preface Editors’ Preface Contributors’ Biographies Acknowledgment

7 8 9 11 13

Part One: The Productions 1: Nick Enright: A Life in Theatre Anne Pender

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2: Life or a Cabaret?: Nick Enright and The Boy from Oz Peter Fitzpatrick

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3: Masculinity, Guilt and the Moral Failures of the Body: Nick Enright’s Screenplays Susan Lever

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4: The Collaboration Process: Nick Enright and Justin Monjo’s Adaptation of Cloudstreet Jack Teiwes

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5: Youthful Presence: Nick Enright as Teacher and A Property of the Clan Mary Ann Hunter

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6: Enright’s Mongrels as Intervention in the Canon of Contemporary Australian Drama Veronica Kelly

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7: Enright on the Record: Evidence from the Television Archives of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Adrian Kiernander

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8: Mongrels and Young Curs: The Hounding of the Feminine in St James Infirmary, Good Works, Blackrock and Spurboard Jane O’Sullivan

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9: Anxiety and a Fragmented Australia in Nick Enright’s A Man With Five Children Felicity Plunkett

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10: “Loved Every Minute of It”: Nimrod, Enright’s The Venetian Twins and the Invention of Popular Theatre Julian Meyrick

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11: Summer Rain: Sweet Nostalgia Susan Lever and Anne Pender

Part Two: The Collaborator 12: Nick Enright: A Man With Many Children George Ogilvie

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13: Nick Enright: Friend Sandy Gore

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14: Nick Enright: An Acting Teacher Recollected Karen Vickery

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15: Prima Le Parole E Poi La Musica Terence Clarke

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Appendix: Works by Nick Enright

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List of Figures Cover Photograph: Deidre Rubenstein, Nick Enright and Andrew Ross in Songs of Love and Desperation, The Tilbury Hotel, 1986. Photographer: Stuart Campbell. Figure 1: A gentle caricature of Nick Enright as scribe/researcher by collaborator, designer John Senczuk. Figure 2: Geraldine Turner, Billie Brown, Elise Grieg and Anthony Weigh in the Queensland Theatre Company 1997 production of Summer Rain. Photographer: Rob Maccoll. Figure 3: The company for the 1998 production of Cloudstreet, Company B Belvoir and Black Swan Theatre. Photographer: Heidrun Lohr. Figure 4: Matt Costelli, Jackson Castiglione and Mathew Ralph in the 1996 Black Swan Theatre Company production of Blackrock. Photographer: William Crabb. Figure 5: Tony Sheldon and John Howard in the Sydney Theatre Company 1997 production of Mongrels. Photographer: Tracey Schramm. Figure 6: Jon Ewing, Tara Morice, John Simpson, Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe, Bernadette Robinson, Terry Bader, Genevieve Lemon and Arky Michael in the Queensland State Theatre Company 1990 production of The Venetian Twins. Photographer: Rob Maccoll.

Series Editor’s Preface I welcomed the opportunity to include this volume in the Rodopi series on Australian playwrights as it addresses a glaring gap in the current scholarship. Volume 12 is the first detailed analysis about the legacy of Nick Enright and I am extremely pleased that Anne Pender and Susan Lever were able to bring together both theatre scholars and practitioners to provide insights on aspects of his life and career. Most importantly, Enright was a dynamic, influential figure whose work made a significant contribution to Australian theatre and appropriate recognition is overdue. This volume considers Nick’s prominent works and captures impressions of Nick at work. It focuses attention on the broad scope of his scripts and musicals, highlights productions that have been seen by diverse audiences, and describes his significant working processes and collaborations. Nick Enright was a major force in Australian theatre, and is sadly missed. Peta Tait La Trobe University

Editors’ Preface In this volume of essays and recollections, scholars, actors, directors, and acting teachers explore Nick Enright’s contribution to theatre. The book is designed to explain, illuminate and debate Enright’s plays, television and film scripts, his directing style and his approach to acting. Enright’s drama is frequently studied by students at high school and at university. The essays and recollections included in this book will inspire and inform students, teachers, scholars and theatre enthusiasts. Part One opens with an overview of Enright’s career in theatre followed by an essay by Peter Fitzpatrick about one of Enright’s most well-known works, The Boy from Oz, in order to give readers, including those based overseas, an immediate sense of the important achievements of Enright’s career which include musicals, film and theatre. The ensuing chapters are arranged to convey the full extent of his remarkable oeuvre, followed by chapters with detailed textual analysis of Enright’s plays. Part Two consists of moving tributes from artistic collaborators. These recollections serve to document Enright’s approaches to writing and teaching acting, and his attitudes to theatre, as well as celebrating the warmth and love that this man extended to those with whom he worked. Anne Pender and Susan Lever

Contributors’ Biographies Terence Clarke has worked in theatre for over thirty years, mainly as director, composer, and educator, but also as actor, dramaturg, pianist, and musical director. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2007 for services to the performing arts. Peter Fitzpatrick is Honorary Professor in Drama and Theatre Studies at Monash University in Melbourne. He is a prolific director of musical theatre as well as a widely published Australian theatre scholar. Sandy Gore graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1969. She has since had a distinguished career in theatre, television and film. Sandy has played lead roles in Medea, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and Pygmalion (all at the Melbourne Theatre Company). Sandy’s Enright credits include Daylight Saving and the acclaimed film Lorenzo’s Oil. Mary Ann Hunter is Lecturer in Drama and Performance at the University of Queensland and Research Associate with the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. Mary Ann also works as a freelance broadcaster and writer and her current research interests include mediation and the role of the arts in peace-building. Veronica Kelly is Professor of Drama at the School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland. Her research areas include modern and colonial drama and theatre history. Veronica’s study of Australian stars of costume drama will be published by Currency House in 2009. Adrian Kiernander is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of New England, New South Wales. He is the author of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil (1993), and has published extensively on issues of gender and sexuality in theatre. Together with Jonathan Bollen and Bruce Parr he has co-edited a collection of essays on gender and performance entitled What a Man’s Gotta Do?, and has co-authored a book on masculinity in Australian theatre, Men at Play (Rodopi 2008).

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Nick Enright: An Actor’s Playwright

Susan Lever is Associate Professor of English at the Australian Defence Force Academy, and has published widely in Australian literary studies. Her books include A Question of Commitment: Australian Literature in the Twenty Years After the War (1989), Real Relations: The Feminist Politics of Form in Australian Fiction (2000) and David Foster: The Satirist of Australia (2008). Julian Meyrick is a Research Fellow at La Trobe University in Melbourne and, until recently, Associate Director and Literary Adviser at the Melbourne Theatre Company. He has published in the fields of theatre history, performance practice and dramaturgical theory. Julian authored the history of Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre, See How It Runs (2002). George Ogilvie was awarded the Order of Australia for his work in the theatre, the Byron Kennedy Award for work in film, and was the recipient of a Keating Fellowship in order to write his autobiography, Simple Gifts. His friendship with Nick Enright began in the 1960s and their work together on Nick’s plays spread over the following decades to many theatres throughout Australia. Jane O’Sullivan is Senior Lecturer in Film and Popular Culture at the University of New England, New South Wales. Her research interests focus on issues of gender and she is currently coauthoring a book on gender relations in selected US, UK and Australian television drama series. Anne Pender is Senior Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at the University of New England, New South Wales. Anne is the author of a monograph, Christina Stead: Satirist (2002), and is currently working on a study of Barry Humphries, funded by the Australian Research Council. Felicity Plunkett is an Honorary Research Consultant at the University of Queensland, where she teaches Literature and Poetics. Her specific research interests include Australian literature, contemporary poetry and poetics, and elegy. Jack Teiwes is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Karen Vickery trained as an actor at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in the early 1980s, when Nick Enright was Head of Acting. Since then, she has worked extensively in theatre, television and radio and teaches at NIDA. She has translated Russian classics, works as a dramaturg and is writing a thesis on Aleksandr Ostrovsky.

Acknowledgement The editors would like to acknowledge the kind help of Ian Olorenshaw, who assisted with the planning of the Nick Enright Conference. Veronica Kelly’s ‘Enright’s Mongrels as Intervention in the Canon of Contemporary Australian Drama’ first appeared in June 1994 in Southerly 54(2): 5–22, and is republished here with permission.

Part One The Productions

Chapter 1 Nick Enright: A Life in Theatre Anne Pender Abstract Nick Enright wrote more than fifty plays for the stage, television and radio, translated and adapted plays, and taught acting to students in varied settings both in Australia and the United States (see Appendix). His repertoire included comedy, social realism, farce, fantasy and the musical. In addition to his prodigious contribution to all of these genres, he was a passionate advocate for the actor and the theatre in contemporary society. This chapter summarises Nick Enright’s career in theatre and serves to introduce the essays in this volume by locating them in relation to that career.

When Nick Enright died in 2003 of cancer at the age of fifty-two, it was clear that the world of theatre had lost one of its most brilliant members. Enright was one of Australia’s most significant and successful playwrights. As a writer, director, actor and teacher he influenced theatre in Australia for over twenty-five years. In 2004 Enright was recognised for his contribution to Australian theatre and posthumously appointed as Member of the Order of Australia. He wrote more than fifty plays for the stage, television and radio, translated and adapted plays, and taught acting to students in varied settings both in Australia and the United States. Enright’s repertoire included comedy (see Chapters 10 and 11), social realism (see Chapter 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9), farce (see Chapter 11), and the musical (see Chapters 2, 10 and 11). In addition to his prodigious contribution to all of these genres, he was a passionate advocate for the actor and the theatre in contemporary society. As a young man Enright always seemed to be ahead of his peers. The director Peter Kingston, who met Nick in 1969, recalls that Nick “elicited a sense of awe” (Kingston 2005: 3). For the young Kingston, Enright was the first person he had met in his career who was fully dedicated to theatre as a vocation. Within his own career Enright constantly moved between roles, from actor to director to

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writer, to teacher and then back to director again. He is remembered as a man who always gave total commitment and was unafraid of experimentation. Enright’s passion for drama began at the age of six, when a neighbour visited his house with a simple home-made theatre constructed of a box with two rods in it. The neighbour was John Bell and he showed Enright a Pollocks toy theatre with various scenes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Bell, who was a young teenager at the time, had sketched the scenes himself. A few years later, Nick saw Bell perform in Maitland at a charity concert. When Enright left school and began working in the theatre around Sydney, he became friends with Bell. It was Bell who inspired Enright to choose to return to working in theatre when he finished his university studies, and to join the Nimrod Theatre in Sydney. Enright told Adrian Kiernander in an interview in 1992 that Bell encouraged him in his belief that it would be possible to pursue a career in theatre (1992). Nicholas Paul Enright was born in Maitland, New South Wales, on 22 December 1950, one of the five children of Joan Marie Brooke and Walter Anthony Gerard Enright. The family had come to Australia from Ireland in the 1860s. John Enright came from Limerick to New South Wales in 1867 and settled in the Hunter Valley, establishing himself as a stock and station agent. Since 1896 a few of John Enright’s descendants have served the Hunter Valley region as lawyers. One of these men was Nick’s father, Walter Enright. As a teenager Enright was sent to board at St Ignatius College, Riverview in Sydney, for his high school education, between 1962 and 1967. He was a brilliant pupil, received outstanding results in his final year and was the top Latin scholar in the state of New South Wales when he completed his matriculation examinations. He played the roles of Hamlet and Lady Macbeth in school productions and, while he was still in high school, he contributed sketches to the very popular television comedy, The Mavis Bramston Show. When he finished high school at the age of sixteen, Enright secured a job with J. C. Williamson, playing Noah Claypole in their production of Lionel Bart’s musical, Oliver! at the Sydney Tivoli in 1968. When he recalled this experience later on in his life in the 2002 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture, Enright remembered the thrill of being part of The Firm, as it was known. But he also recalled the frustration of working

Nick Enright: A Life in Theatre

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in an environment with very little opportunity for a shared role in the creative process. This early experience of commercial theatre was formative. Throughout his career Enright maintained his conviction about the power of collaboration in the theatre and stressed the creative strength of actors and directors in community. He insisted on working with actors on his plays at the end of the writing process, involving them in the essential final stages of script development. In the recollections by director George Ogilvie and National Institute of Dramatic Art lecturer Karen Vickery, included in Part Two of this volume, this very important dimension of Enright’s approach to theatre-making is explained and explored. Enright’s commitment to the communal structure of playmaking never waned. At the end of his life, in his Rex Cramphorn lecture, Enright lamented what he observed as a loss of real community in drama schools in addition to the lack of funding and resources for ensemble theatre in Australia (Enright 2003: 23). When he left high school, Enright spent a year in California as an American Field Service high school exchange student. On his return to Australia, he enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Sydney, and once he had finished in 1971 he joined the newly formed Nimrod Street Theatre in Darlinghurst, Sydney, as a general assistant. His work with Rex Cramphorn at this theatre gave him considerable insight into the value of theatre. Enright described Cramphorn as a ‘theatrical quietist’. He was one of the leading theatre practitioners of the renaissance in Australian theatre that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. Enright said that his year at Nimrod was “the best apprenticeship I could have had, because it brought me so close to the business of playmaking” (Kiernander 1992). Moreover he valued this year at Nimrod because he said that it was “the only time that I’ve ever experienced democracy in the theatre” (Ibid). In the same interview Enright also recalled the excitement at Nimrod and the conviction of the “aesthetic and political necessity” to produce Australian plays (Ibid). After that important year, Enright was appointed by the Melbourne Theatre Company as their first ever trainee director. A couple of years later he was awarded a grant from the Australia Council to study at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he gained a Master’s degree in Fine Arts in 1977. He trained with the actress Olympia Dukakis, and was reportedly an outstanding

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student. Enright also taught acting to students in the dance programme at New York University during this period. After receiving considerable encouragement from the American playwright Israel Horovitz, he commenced his own playwriting career. He also immersed himself in Strasberg’s approach to acting in the Method, and believed that an actor could “bring life to the human soul – in circumstances created by the playwright” (Kingston 2005: 4). Enright always worked on creating realist characters rather than stereotypes, encouraging actors not simply to conjure an emotional state, not to manipulate emotion in their character, but to personalise dialogue and make a “personal commitment and connection to the text” (see Chapter 14 in this volume). Between 1978 and 1981 Enright worked as assistant director at the South Australian Theatre Company. Later on in his life, he recalled that this period constituted his “real apprenticeship” in the theatre (Enright 2003). He directed and performed in a variety of educational and community theatre productions. Enright also produced a documentary musical play set in Adelaide during the Depression, entitled On the Wallaby. The show was celebrated by critics Helen Hardwick and Malcolm Blaylock for its critical attitude to “the privilege of class, the position of women, and the brutality of poverty” (1983: 158). In 1981, Enright also toured New South Wales with a show called Me ’n’ Me Mate. He observed first-hand the hardships of life on the sheep stations in the far west of the state and the privations of life in many regional areas of Australia. In 1979 Enright collaborated with Terence Clarke on a musical adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s The Venetian Twins (See Chapter 10). The production, directed by John Bell, brought Enright considerable acclaim. Moreover it was a commercial triumph, and was praised by critics because it marked a new direction in the development of Australian theatre. During the 1980s Enright moved back to Sydney as his career progressed. He took up the role of Head of Acting at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and steadily worked on his scriptwriting projects, producing a series of musicals. One of these was Variations, a musical performed in 1982 that considers women’s roles in families in the context of the immense social change over the two preceding decades. It was the second of his collaborations with


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Terence Clarke, and won the New South Wales Premier’s Play Award in 1983 but has never been performed since. In 1983 Enright and Clarke wrote Summer Rain, a musical comedy about a troupe of actors who are prevented from leaving a small country town at Christmas time in 1945, because of a deluge of rain (see Chapter 11). It was written for the graduating class of NIDA with seventeen principals, and was tailored to the particular strengths and talents of the individual members of the class. Summer Rain was received warmly but criticised for being convoluted in its plot. Australia’s leading director Gale Edwards directed the musical, a nostalgia piece that traces the fortunes of a travelling show and their stay in a town celebrating the long-awaited drought-breaking rain. Enright had done his homework, as the years between 1937 and 1945 were extremely dry, with the wheat yields of 1938 amongst the lowest on record. The Nepean Dam was empty in 1940 and much of the country was plunged into economic hardship. Enright and Clarke were awarded funds from the Australian Bicentennial Authority to develop a full-scale production of Summer Rain to be staged in 1988 but it did not eventuate. However, Richard Wherrett programmed a new version of the musical for the 1989 season of the Sydney Theatre Company (STC). Directed by Rodney Fisher, this 1989 production featured Peter Carroll and Nancye Hayes as Harold and Ruby Slocum. Genevieve Lemon played Lorna. Another version of Summer Rain opened Robyn Nevin’s first season at the Queensland Theatre Company in 1997. By this time the story was simpler and the emotional centre of the play was more developed. In 2005 Robyn Nevin directed Summer Rain for the STC, with Nancye Hayes, Christopher Parker and Genevieve Lemon amongst the cast. In 1984 Enright decided to focus on his scriptwriting and gave up his teaching job at NIDA. But this proved more difficult than he had anticipated. Enright believed that to write is “to surrender up the unconscious part of you which is going to put itself into the work, and try and tell a story” (Kelly 1994: 63). His profound interest in understanding his own life and personality inspired him to undertake six years in psychoanalysis. He believed that we are all “prisoners […] creatures of our own preoccupations and obsessions”. Enright’s preoccupations were “family and the fate of the young” (Ibid). Enright experienced depression at various stages of his life and expressed

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frustration about producing the work of which he felt he was capable.1 In A Man With Five Children, one of Enright’s last plays, he explored his ideas about family and fate. Felicity Plunkett examines this play in relation to its historical context in her chapter on anxiety and biography (see Chapter 9). Enright’s success with his Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) television adaptation of Come in Spinner in 1989 renewed his commitment to writing. The award-winning series dramatises a novel about wartime Sydney, written by Florence James and Dymphna Cusack and published in 1957. He also enjoyed huge acclaim in 1989 with his play Daylight Saving, which Sandra Bates directed for the Ensemble Theatre. The STC had not been able to stage it. With hints of the work of David Williamson, the play is a romantic comedy; but it is also about loneliness and childlessness. Enright dedicated the play to his close friend Sandy Gore, and wrote the female lead (Felicity) for her. Sandy Gore’s recollection in Part Two of this volume testifies to the fact that Daylight Saving marked a turning point in Enright’s career (see Chapter 13). Gore also offers insight into Nick’s talent and integrity as a writer as well as his generosity and loyalty as a friend. The character of Felicity also drew on Nick’s friend Gay Bilson, who was a chef at a popular restaurant at Berowra Waters. It is set on the eve of daylight saving. Felicity is enjoying a night at home and entertaining an old lover from her student days. However, their evening is interrupted by ructions at the restaurant, Felicity’s mother and the unexpected return of Tom, Felicity’s husband. Although the play is a comedy, it had “a serious heartbeat” (Kingston 2005: 4). Daylight Saving confirmed Enright’s status as a successful commercial playwright. Nevertheless Nick was not fully satisfied with comic writing (Marr 2003: 37). In the 1990s Enright wrote two semi-autobiographical stage plays, St James Infirmary Blues (1990) and Mongrels (1991). Mongrels deals with the twin themes of artistic and personal rivalry, and is based on the actual friendship between two Australian playwrights, Peter Kenna and Jim McNeil. Peter Kenna and Enright had been close friends and Enright spoke of him as “intransigent […] a man fuelled on anger” (Kiernander 1992). Enright revealed that Mongrels was “the most personal thing I’ve ever written […] the closest I’ve ever come to a self-portrait”, “a self-examination” in the character O’Hara (Kelly 1994: 70–71). He explained that the under-


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lying idea for the play was the idea of the relationship between goodness and art. He wrote the character of Burke for the actor John Howard, and Mongrels is regarded by theatre critic Veronica Kelly as Enright’s “most powerful and complex drama” (Kelly 1995: 209). Adrian Kiernander offers a vivid comparison of the differences between the first production of the play at the Ensemble Theatre in 1991 and its revival by the Sydney Theatre Company in 1997 (see Chapter 7). He reflects on recurring questions about masculinity, sexuality and gender that infuse the plays Mongrels, Blackrock and Good Works and analyses interviews, play footage and commentary from the ABC archive about Enright’s enduring interest in expressions of sexuality, and the processes and ethics of theatre-making. Veronica Kelly’s essay on Mongrels and its intervention in the canon of contemporary drama contextualises the play in Australian theatre history and offers an extended analysis of character, language, gender and meta-theatre in the play (see Chapter 6). Enright and co-writer and director George Miller achieved international success with the screenplay for the feature film Lorenzo’s Oil (1992), with Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte in the lead roles. Enright described his collaboration with Miller, stating that “he is quite literally the best teacher I have ever known […] He took me through a process that was like film school; an encapsulation of the principles and techniques that underlie screen writing” (Kelly 1994: 74). Susan Lever explores several of Enright’s screenplays and examines his portrayal of guilt, morality and illness, with an extended discussion of Enright and Miller’s Lorenzo’s Oil as a contemporary morality play (see Chapter 3). At this time Enright also returned to his enduring interest in youth culture. His play A Property of the Clan (1992) evolved out of a set of tragic events. The trigger event behind the script was the brutal murder of a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, Leigh Leigh in 1989, at Stockton Beach, Newcastle. Enright’s play fictionalised this event and was commissioned by Brian Joyce of the Freewheels Theatre-inEducation company in Newcastle. Enright worked with various members of the Stockton community before he drafted the script of the play. He then came back to those people for a group reading. Mary Ann Hunter examines the play and considers the reasons for its potency and longevity for a youth audience, its transfiguration in Enright’s next play (Blackrock) and the

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ways in which community and youth theatre have developed and adapted both works (see Chapter 5). Subsequently a new play for adults was developed by Enright drawing on the same subject matter. It was also completely fictional even though it was developed out of Property. Some critics, however, considered that Blackrock lacked the “strong focus and convincing characterisation” of Property (Akerholt 2000: 223; Longworth 1996: 6). Enright worked with director Steven Vidler to adapt Blackrock as a feature film. Both the play and the movie aroused criticism at the time. Enright spoke in public about the violence of sexual behaviour amongst young men, as the story deals with the rape and murder of a young girl and the failure of a male witness to take action about what he sees. Enright explained his view that most Australian men dislike women and his observation that the “real emotional energy” of men in our culture is towards other men.2 Helen Garner expressed her dissatisfaction with the play and the film version of Blackrock for their failure to imagine the young female characters as individuals when the young males are given an attentiveness and an “angry pity” (Garner 1997: B27). Jane O’Sullivan examines St James Infirmary, Good Works, Blackrock and Spurboard, and argues that the “erasure” of the women and the feminine demands attention, that modes of behaviour understood as feminine in the plays serve to offer definition to performances of hegemonic masculinity, and that female characters often function as aides to the recuperation of feeling at the expense of any satisfactory exploration of the women’s individual concerns (see Chapter 8). In 1994, Enright’s play Good Works premiered. Set in a country town, the play continued some of the themes of Blackrock and Property. One critic deemed it as a “worthy successor” to A Hard God (1973) by Peter Kenna, and as a “searing expose of inhumanity” (Parr 1996: 216–217). One of Enright’s greatest successes followed in 1998 with his stage adaptation with Justin Monjo of Tim Winton’s novel Cloudstreet. Directed by Neil Armfield, the production received accolades and led to national and international tours. Jack Teiwes analyses the adaptation process that produced an outstandingly successful play in three acts and discusses the way in which the achievement powerfully illustrates Enright’s belief in the value of collaboration (see Chapter 4).


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In 1998 Enright wrote the very popular musical, The Boy from Oz, about the life of performer-singer Peter Allen. Hugh Jackman starred as Allen in the Broadway season of 2003–2004. Peter Fitzpatrick analyses some of the structural and creative choices in Nick Enright’s book for The Boy from Oz with reference to earlier drafts of the script, and explores the way in which Enright attempted to develop psychological complexity and artistic depth in the portrayal of Peter Allen, rather than presenting a “jukebox musical” (see Chapter 2). Nick Enright was an exceptionally talented writer. His contribution to the teaching of acting in Australia is remarkable also. In 2000 Enright formed a professional ensemble in Sydney called State of Play in collaboration with Jessica Machin and Julian Louis. When he died of cancer on 30 March 2003, at the age of fifty-two, he had not limited his writing to one particular genre of drama. Nor had he settled on a genre he preferred. Yet Enright’s outstanding contribution to musical theatre and social realism on the stage is clear, and ensures him a central place in Australian theatre history.

Acknowledgement The author wishes to thank Ian Enright and David Marr for their valuable assistance in the research for this chapter. Further information may be obtained through Hilary Linstead and Associates, PO Box 1536, Strawberry Hills, NSW 2016.

Notes 1 2

Interview with Ian Enright by Anne Pender, 2005. Enright quoted in The Courier Mail (11 April 1997): 19.

Works cited Akerholt, May-Brit. 2000. ‘Contemporary theatre’ in Webby, Elizabeth (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 209–231. Enright, Ian. 2005. Unpublished interview with author. Enright, Nick. 1997. The Courier Mail (11 April): 19. —— 2003. ‘Collaboration and Community’, Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture, 24 November 2002, Australasian Drama Studies 42 (April): 14–25, p. 23. Garner, Helen. 1997. ‘An Outbreak of Acting’, The Australian’s Review of Books (14 May): B27. Hardwick, Helen and Malcolm Blaylock. 1983. Review of On the Wallaby, Australasian Drama Studies 1, 2 (April): 157–159. Kelly, Veronica. 1994. ‘A Form of Music: An Interview with Nick Enright’, Australasian Drama Studies (April): 58–76.

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—— 1995. ‘Nick Enright’, in Parsons, Philip (ed.) Companion to Theatre in Australia. Sydney: Currency Press: 209–210. Kiernander, Adrian. 1992. Unpublished Interview with Nick Enright (17 November). Kingston, Peter. 2005. ‘Directing Nick Enright’, Dialogue 64 (December): 3–4. Longworth, Ken. 1996. Newcastle Herald (15 March 1996): 6. Marr, David. 2003. ‘Adored Member of Stage’s Family’, in The Sydney Morning Herald (2 April 2003): 37 Parr, Bruce. 1996. Review of Good Works, Australasian Drama Studies 29 (October): 216–220. Pender, Anne. 2006. ‘Nick Enright’ in Samuels, Selina (ed.), Australian Writers, 1975–2000, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 325, Detroit: Thomson Gale: 82–87.

Chapter 2 Life or a Cabaret?: Nick Enright and The Boy from Oz Peter Fitzpatrick Abstract This chapter analyses a number of structural and other creative choices in Nick Enright’s book for The Boy from Oz in the light of his earlier drafts of the script. Its focus is on the ways in which Enright sought to add psychological complexity to the characterisation of Peter Allen, and artistic depth to the show, rather than simply accepting the commercial priorities that customarily apply to the genre of the “jukebox musical”. This discussion also aims to raise and pursue issues about the nature of the form, about the specific challenges of dramatising an actual life and working with the substantial compositions of a dead “collaborator”, and about the politics of collaboration in a form of theatre that incorporates a range of performance languages. It distinguishes Enright’s work for the Australian production of the show from the much less subtle book that replaced it for the Broadway version of the show. It assumes, and argues, that popular and commercial projects in the theatre are not only deserving of serious critical attention, but may – sometimes – produce work of very high quality.

The Boy from Oz toured Australia for almost two years after its Sydney premiere on 5 March 1998, clocking up 766 performances in four capital cities, and in each one accumulating an impressive portfolio of enthusiastic reviews.1 Most of the critics raised, in one way or another, the question that tediously haunts every halfwaysuccessful new Australian musical: ‘Is The Boy from Oz the Great Australian Musical – at last?’ (Thomson 1999: 11), and all speculated on its corollary, the odds of Making It Overseas; the prognosis, by general consent, was excellent. Long before the show opened, its Broadway ambitions were public knowledge; the media release announcing the assembling of an impressive creative and production team in early 1996 was explicit about this, quoting co-producer Robert Fox’s confidence that “Peter Allen’s story belongs as much to Broadway as it does to Australia”.2 The optimism about its chances in New York was guarded: Bryce Hallett raised it in order to set it aside

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(“whether the cleverly conceived biographical journey of irrepressible entertainer Peter Allen has the legs to make it on Broadway is, for the moment, beside the point”) (1998: 12); Helen Thomson pondered carefully the question whether the show “could cut it on big, international stages” (“I think so, given the world-class quality of the production and the universal appeal of the small-town boy to star story”) (1999: 11); and Baz Bamigboye told his London readership that it could never travel as it was: However, for it to cross the Pacific to the U.S. and New York, or go to the West End, it must undergo extensive reworking. A lot of the local patter will not make sense outside Australia. For starters, Allen wrote an unofficial anthem, ‘I Still Call Australia Home’, which I can’t imagine British people singing along with, as Australian audiences do. Gale Edwards and her team know this and are working to give The Boy From Oz new life to appeal overseas. (Bamigboye 2000: 13)

Nick Enright, the distinguished Sydney playwright who had been engaged to write the book for a story of Peter Allen’s life that could be told through a compilation of his biggest song-writing hits, certainly “knew this”, partly no doubt from an informed sense of what might work on stage, but partly from the tricky business of working on the script for the Australian season with the show’s producers (Ben Gannon and the American impresario Robert Fox) through an intense period of gestation that dominated his writing life for more than two years. Enright’s detailed ‘Notes and Questions for a New Version, February 2000’, sets out the case for a revision of the show that not only translates the “local patter” for a Broadway audience but finds compensation for loosening some of the soil around its Australian roots in a telling of Peter Allen’s story “with more depth”.3 It was not so much, for him, a matter of giving the musical “a new life” as of reestablishing a former one: There are, in effect, two Peter Allens. There is the seemingly invulnerable performer of sexual energy, deadpan wit and chutzpah; there is the songwriter who mostly writes of the pain of abandonment, transience, solitude, lost love and faded dreams. Each feeds the other, and of course both make the whole man. Most of our arguments in the development period were about the [im]balance between these two Peters in the show […]

Life or a Cabaret?: The Boy from Oz

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But if we are to get inside Peter Allen, then we need to see both Peters, and understand by the time he sings ‘Tenterfield Saddler’, his definitive statement as a songwriter, that both Peters are one and the same man. […] This is a musical: its emotional centre is in the songs. Peter’s songs won’t move our story (a special challenge in this project) but they will dictate the emotional territory of the show. Before deciding to work on this show, I sat and listened to every Peter Allen song I could find. In our often acrimonious disagreements during the development period, I believe Ben and Robert thought that I was taking the show into darker territory out of perversity; but I was trying to do the task I had been hired to do: to fashion a book which would support a show honouring Peter Allen as a songwriter. We need to discuss this, as I don’t wish to be misrepresented again.4

In the detailed notes that follow, Enright foreshadowed a number of possible changes. Nothing was sacred. ‘Continental American’ might go from the top of the show, and ‘Bicoastal’ with its attendant failedaudition scene from early in the second act. The problematic ‘I Still Call Australia Home’, the anthem that had become embedded in the Australian consciousness, for better or worse, as the signature tune of Qantas advertisements, might move from its position in the middle of Act Two to become a new finale, replacing ‘Rio’, the show-stopper which in the Australian version Peter had mischievously withheld from a concert audience understood to be crazy to hear it. The concert format itself, which defined variously a present and a dream reality in the original script, would be diluted in a structure that used the ghost of the child-Peter more extensively. The writer was nothing if not adaptable, though the shrewdness of his detailed comments in these notes continually underscores the sense that he is a writer determined to get it right, not simply a pen for hire: We need to discuss the concert patter, particularly if another writer is to be involved. What is its story function? […] Finally, I am only interested in proceeding with this project if we can find a way of listening to each other, and of making the process of note-giving an open, positive and communicative one. I believe that the process of making the original show was hampered by poor communication, for which we are collectively responsible. I would like to think that we can all improve our skills of communication.5

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Enright was an experienced and generous collaborator, whose skills of communication were already, demonstrably, pretty good; the business of getting The Boy to Broadway evidently involved a higher order of politics. And the signs were not propitious. The employment of “another writer”, to expunge much of the idiom and cultural baggage that defined Allen as a boy from Oz, was ominous. Enright’s diagnosis with cancer later in that year, and the effect of that illness on his capacity to write and to travel, added another, graver element to his frustration with the direction of the project. Finally, it was no longer his at all. When The Boy from Oz enjoyed its long-awaited Broadway opening on 16 October 2003, Martin Sherman was credited as writer of the show. The script was noted as “based on the original book by Nick Enright”, but it was a decidedly different piece. There were added songs6 (thanks to a revised rights deal that removed the original constraint that only twenty-four of Allen’s songs could be used), but there was certainly not “added depth”. The suicide of Peter’s father, which in Enright’s book provided the shadow that could not be named until near the end of Peter’s concert journey, was neatly dispatched as an instance of the singer’s bouncy resilience, and, as Michael Gross observed, there was little left of Enright’s “darker territory”: Peter Allen, the subject of the bio-musical The Boy from Oz, lived enough lives to fill several musicals […] But there’s only one Peter Allen musical in New York this fall: the one opening on Oct 16 at the Imperial Theater on Broadway, starring the Hollywood dreamboat Hugh Jackman. It depicts Allen as an exuberant fount of fun, a man whose inner life was almost as cheery as his trademark Hawaiian shirts. […] Its portrait of him is, to say the least, highly selective. Ben Gannon, who produced The Boy from Oz with Robert Fox, said, “To create a musical, you’ve got to make something that’s going to work for a very big worldwide audience”. Asked if The Boy from Oz had ignored some of the darker complexities of Allen’s life to attract a large audience, Mr Gannon said, “I don’t really think Peter had a dark side.” (Gross 2003: 44)

There was little left that was distinctively Australian, though ‘I Still Call Australia Home’ controversially retained its spot in the second act: But Jackman, who sings and dances much better than the real Peter Allen ever did, is a salve for all wounds […] Jackman even gets away with the show’s silliest error: trying to raise Ozzian patriotism in the


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middle of Manhattan, with him belting out ‘I Still Call Australia Home’ before a full-stage backdrop of the Australian flag. Here the show’s creators have surely lapsed into self-delusion. Like many deeply alienated entertainers, Peter Allen was a canny showbiz manipulator his whole life long; the only Oz for which he ever felt an ounce of genuine patriotism was the one manufactured by MGM, with the yellow brick road and the teenage Judy. (Feingold 2003: 15)

Enright’s concept for the show, built generally on the precept that “you can take the boy out of Tenterfield but you can’t take Tenterfield out of the boy”, might have provided at least some basis for a counter-argument, but there was little to substantiate it in the Broadway version. And the song to which the show in Australia had been designed to move, and that Enright regarded as Allen’s “distinctive statement as a songwriter”, ‘Tenterfield Saddler’, was dropped altogether. It was perhaps too specific a song, as well as too wistfully downbeat, to be served up to a Broadway audience – not just at 10.30 pm, apparently, but at any time. When the show returned to Australia in 2006 for its blockbuster seasons at the Sydney Entertainment Centre and Melbourne’s Vodafone Arena, it was unashamedly presented as a virtuoso vehicle for Jackman, its megastar. The local jokes and vernacular were restored for Australian audiences, and with them Nick Enright’s credit as writer of the show, but the complex fusions of time-present and time-past, the intermingling of parallel realities in the story-telling, and the exploration of both “how and why the public Peter masked the private” had largely been lost in transit. Nick Enright had died on 30 March 2003, seven months before the New York opening. While the final chapters in the evolution of The Boy from Oz are not parts of his story, they do represent the pressures under which the show was created. And they illuminate the twists and turns of the process in its first three years, in which Enright’s attempts to make something that met his own artistic standards and his goal of “honouring Peter Allen as a songwriter” were in continual tension with the commercial and global aspirations of the project, and with the very unusual challenges that the commission posed to him as a writer. The subject The Boy from Oz effectively consumed Nick Enright for much of the last six or seven years of his life. There are a number of fairly obvious

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reasons for his attraction to the project. It was, first and self-evidently, a musical, and alongside a distinguished career as a playwright in the “straight” theatre, Enright had always shown a passionate interest in the form.7 Partly, no doubt, that came from a boyhood about as devoted to Broadway musicals and Hollywood shows as Peter Allen’s own. But it also offered scope for him to pursue a number of the imaginative priorities that are consistent in his practice as a writer. The sense that linear structures and conversational prose are never quite multi-layered enough to carry complex narratives is one of those things; the subliminal power of music and song, and the explicit rejection of realist conventions and constraints that came with the territory of “the musical”, were obvious fascinations. And he was always committed to the collaborative models of work that are fundamental to the genre; the sense that the writer can never be an isolated wordsmith in a form encompassing so many expressive languages, but was always at least figuratively down there on the stage floor, working with actors and director and choreographer and musical director to fashion something shared and yet greater than all its parts, reflected his preferred kind of theatre. It was a commitment that he outlined a few months before he died, in delivering the 2002 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture, entitled ‘Collaboration and Community’: I want to be a collaborator, working as part of a community […] […] in a theatre of limited resources, I would argue for the greater risk – and the greater good – of developing a thematically related new work with its own organic life, to be performed by its cocreators. In a very specific sense, then all the skills of the actor, and the designer, the stage manager and the other collaborators, are engaged in the organic life of the work and its communication to its audience (20). […] I am sustained by the sense of continuity and community that is provided by membership in an ensemble. It’s hard to stay open, at my age; it’s hard to shut up and listen, to be humble, tranquil and respectful […] I hope we’ll grow together over the next few years; but as you know, in these matters there are no certainties. (Enright 2003: 21, 20, 25)

It was a commitment, also, that had to be rock-solid to survive the particular forms of collaborative behaviour that applied to the making of The Boy from Oz. The Peter Allen story itself offered some enticing possibilities, too. Allen’s negotiations about his sexuality – the inconceivable


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marriage to Liza Minnelli, the sexually ambiguous performance style, the flamboyantly “Bicoastal” way of living, his love for Greg Connell and Connell’s death from AIDS, and Allen’s own death from the same disease – accorded with the interest in a number of Enright’s plays in the emotional topography of growing up gay in Australia. And the powerful elements in the story of Allen’s childhood – the drunken, abusive father and the stoic loving mother, the innocence and vulnerability of the child-self that is never completely outlived, the archetypal event that rises up from the edge of nightmare – were an attraction, as well. The solution that Enright found to Peter’s narrative in The Boy from Oz is similar, in principle, to that which he found for the charting of Tim Donovan’s painful and unresolved movements toward understanding himself in Good Works (1995). The abandonment of linear sequence is part of an investigation of the ways time might work sideways through parallel action and chronological disruption to expose ironies and find explanations in lives that are never lived simply “in the moment”. It produces in the musical not only the ghosts of Young Peter and a number of people long dead, but a sense of the subliminal cues and associations that trigger memory and make it part of a continuous present. Bruce Parr perceptively defines Good Works as “a requiem for childhood lost” (1996: 216); The Boy from Oz in Nick Enright’s version has that poignancy too, together with a sharp sense of the ways in which innocence can be hurt, and of how some wounds never heal. Moreover, the theme of expatriatism was appealing. It has always been of rather disproportionate interest to Australian writers even when, like Enright, they have chosen to make their art at home; the pursuit of art characteristically involves, as it did for Enright, a crossing of cultural boundaries for which international travel is at least a graphic metaphor. The problem of what to do with all the iconography of childhood, all the undeniable love and the unforgotten languages, is one that Enright had in common with his subject, even if for Peter Allen there may have been more to try not to remember. So the story had a good deal going for it. At the same time, there were clear constraints. This was a real life, after all, and there was not much room for negotiation on the events and key people that constituted it: the childhood in small-town Australia, the violent father, the supportive mother, the horrific suicide,8 the precocious song-and-dance act at the pub, the teenybopper tours of the Allen

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Brothers, the meeting with Judy Garland, the strange romance with her daughter, marriage with and divorce from Liza Minnelli, the clubbing in pre-AIDS California and New York, the meeting with Greg and his painful death, the derailed career and the disaster that was Legs Diamond,9 Allen’s periodical homecomings and his exhaustingly high-octane style, Allen’s own death from AIDS – they all had to be in there somewhere. Although in successive drafts the prominence of some of the roles and episodes shifted, the writer had an obligation not only to include them but to understand them and the ways in which they might help make sense of each other. And there was the music. Allen’s songs were the raison d’être of the show, and they had to be fitted to the spine of his story in ways that illuminated who he was. It helped that some of them – the ones that were not driven by manic exuberance – were intensely personal, as the unsympathetic Producer tartly notes in the show: PETER: What about the tape? Did you listen to it? PRODUCER: Remind me. PETER: ‘All the Lives of Me’? ‘Six-thirty Sunday Morning’? PRODUCER: Oh, yeah, I remember. Schick songs. PETER: Shit songs? What do you mean, shit? PRODUCER: Schick songs. Gillette songs. Numbers to slit your wrists by. Who needs them?10

But whether they were Schick songs or shtick songs, few of them were wholly Allen’s own work; lyricists like Carole Bayer Sager and Dean Pitchford had written many of the words that Enright had to make expressive of Allen’s states of feeling. Peter Allen had written both words and music for just eight of the twenty-four songs represented in Enright’s version of the script (‘If You Were Wondering’, ‘When I Get My Name in Lights’, ‘All I Wanted Was the Dream’, ‘Only an Older Woman’, ‘Sure Thing Baby’, and ‘Six-thirty Sunday Morning’ in Act One, ‘I Still Call Australia Home’ and ‘Tenterfield Saddler’ in Act Two). Allen’s biggest international hits – songs like ‘Don’t Wish Too Hard’, ‘I’d Rather Leave While I’m in Love’, ‘Don’t Cry Out Loud’ and ‘Quiet Please, There’s a Lady on the Stage’ (all written in collaboration with Sager), Olivia Newton-John’s signature tune ‘I Honestly Love You’ (written with Jeff Barry) and ‘Arthur’s Theme [Best That You Can Do]’ (written with Sager, Burt Bacharach and Christopher Cross) – had to be in any show about Peter


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Allen, and moreover would be required to carry a lot of the emotional weight. But their lyrics came from the pathos of other people’s stories. Part of what was presented to Enright with the project was a puzzle: a number of odd-shaped pieces, none of them designed to fit together or to be part of any wider narrative context in particular, that were somehow to be fashioned into something that looked and felt like a coherent account of a personal journey through song. The Boy from Oz appeared at a time in Australian musical theatre when the bioconcert was suddenly very much in vogue, and Enright’s challenge in integrating songs that had been written to be both discrete and generic was one that faced the writers of a number of other commercial successes of the 1990s.1 1 Mamma Mia (1999), the jukebox musical built on Abba hits, found its solution by linking the songs to a fictional plot that had nothing to do with the pop group that inspired the show and sold its tickets. Most compilation shows, though, based their stories around the life of a star: Buddy (1989), Shout! (2000) and most recently Dusty (2006) followed the lives and loves of Buddy Holly, Johnny O’Keefe and Dusty Springfield. It helped, in each of these cases, that pop stars have a habit of living fast and dying young, and that some of them can be marketed in a single word; the fact that their hits were rarely their own work (and indeed, in the case of O’Keefe, were all secondary cover-versions of American singles) inevitably restricted the immediacy of the connection between singer and song. The commercial appeal of those shows lay, obviously, in their familiar scores, and it gave them a great advantage over untried and unknown material, despite Michael Feingold’s dismissal of “recycled pop junk” in his review of the Broadway production of The Boy from Oz: It never seems to occur to Broadway producers that the lives of dead performers make lousy musicals, since the source of the audience’s interest cannot, by definition, be part of the show. (2003: 15)

But audiences clearly felt otherwise. And writers of Enright’s stature were unlikely to be content with a box office bonanza alone. It helped that his subject was a little different from Buddy and Johnny and Dusty; Peter Allen had a hand in every song in the show,12 and in almost every case had recorded the definitive version. The tricky thing was to position them within the narrative of his life in ways that gave the illusion of driving the plot rather than simply elaborating it. From the outset, and throughout the myriad revisions of the script, it is

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apparent that Enright wants this to be a successful Australian musical in every sense. His continual manipulation of the building blocks of Allen’s life and music has little to do with commercial opportunism, and everything to do with art. The process The building blocks were not quite as rigid as they appeared. In terms of the life, the prominence and placement of Dick Woolnough’s suicide was a question that had a number of possible answers during the writing process. In all the earliest versions, the father crosses the stage briefly a couple of times in the early scenes, bringing a chill to the mood with his sneering “Who’s the little twinkletoes, then?”; by the end of the process, though, he is the man we never see and are free to imagine, whose influence sours the memories of childhood in ways that can’t yet be defined. In most of those preliminary drafts, he can be named and even made the subject of conspiratorial jokes behind his back (his wife and his son refer to him as “Dirty Dick” when it is safe to do so); in the final Australian version of the show, Dick’s menace is heightened by the fact that he is never named. When he does appear, near the end of the show, he’s a less terrifying presence, though just as disturbing. In the domestic argument in which the boy Peter defends his mother, the final version does not have Dick striking his son, or throwing him to the ground, as all the previous drafts did. He skulks off to the bedroom, and when the gun goes off the primary implication is not that this is his final act of cruelty, but that his suicide is an expression of unbearable shame. The emphasis on his ineffectuality and on the horror that he must have seen, rather than on the trauma of the event’s effect on his son, frees Peter to sing ‘Tenterfield Saddler’ as a song of sympathetic incomprehension, if not quite of understanding, and a form of forgiveness. And the playwright is free to play a little with the intimate moments that nobody alive can know about. A case in point is Peter’s response to the revelation that Greg is dying of AIDS. The factual story tells us that Peter stayed with him, though maintaining his performance career and delivering a rip-roaring show at Radio City three days after Greg’s death. But what did he feel? Enright explores a number of possibilities through the drafts of the show, ranging from withdrawal (both emotional and, in one version, briefly physical) to unquestioning commitment. The possibilities are linked to, and


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perhaps even controlled by, decisions about how and where to position the Allen songs that demand to be included. ‘I’d Rather Leave While I’m in Love’ is initially deployed for this purpose, a gutwrenching solo for Peter as he turns away from the person he loves because he cannot bear to watch him die. But in the draft of 18 April 1997, the song became a fragment, and a suggestion of feelings that are torn in two. It comes, in the notional concert that frames and impels the action of the show, from an apparently random tinkling of the ivories on the “and now for something completely different” principle: PETER: And every time I touch these keys I get a surprise. Let’s see what happens now. What do you think, girls? (He starts to play.) Oh, it’s ballad time! I wrote this one with Carole Bayer Sager. And I think it’s real pretty. I’D RATHER LEAVE WHILE I’M IN LOVE, WHILE I STILL BELIEVE THE MEANING OF THE WORD. I’LL KEEP MY DREAMS AND JUST PRETEND THAT YOU AND I […] (Suddenly the concert reality has evaporated for PETER. It’s New York in the mid-1980s. GREG approaches.) GREG: I’m glad you were there. I hate hospitals and doctors and shit. You got me through. Peter, we’ve had some good times. Yeah? (PETER nods.) But things are going to get rough. I need to know – PETER: Let’s take one day at a time. (He goes on playing. GREG is loud, angry.) GREG: Will you stop playing the goddam piano? (PETER stops.) Peter, why won’t you deal with this?13

Peter does deal with it, or seems to. After the strained silence he sings another song, ‘What We Don’t Have Is Time’, vowing to “Stay with you to the end, With you my friend”. The function of ‘I’d Rather Leave’, which for the purpose is well-enough known not to need to be sung through, is to act as a musical sub-text, articulating Peter’s impulse to get away. The song focuses a choice in process, and a

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turning-point for a personality already understood to be startlingly, perhaps destructively, self-reliant. It was a clever, perhaps inspired, solution. But it was not, evidently, good enough for the writer. In what became the final Australian version, the moment turned on a different song. ‘I’d Rather Leave While I’m in Love’ had already been heard, in full, a walkingout-on-Peter solo for Liza. The scene with Greg begins, similarly, in concert mode: PETER: Yeah that was ‘Arthur’s Theme’. I wrote that for my exwife’s movie. You see, I like to write songs for special people. My ex-wife, my mother-in-law, my grandfather. Here’s one I wrote for Olivia Newton-John. Now when Olivia recorded it, it turned me from a sensitive singer-songwriter into a sensitive singer-songwriter with a swell beach house. I think you’ll know it. MAYBE I HANG AROUND HERE A LITTLE MORE THAN I SHOULD. WE BOTH KNOW I’VE GOT SOMEWHERE ELSE TO GO, BUT I’VE GOT SOMETHING TO TELL YOU I NEVER THOUGHT I WOULD, BUT I BELIEVE YOU REALLY OUGHT TO KNOW. (Early 1980s. GREG is there.) I LOVE YOU, I HONESTLY LOVE YOU. GREG: Peter […] (PETER goes on playing) Peter, listen to me. This is not the flu. Things are going to get rough. I’m going to get real sick. (PETER stops.) I need to know – PETER: Hey! Let’s just take one day at a time.14

It ends in the same way, with ‘What We Don’t Have Is Time’. It’s another good choice; whether it is a better one is a question that can only be answered by reference to the priorities that it seems to serve. This time the underscore leaves the audience in no doubt about Peter’s depth of commitment, or the decision that he will make. The focus is not on the obvious moment of psychological choice in itself, but on the unexpressed feelings behind it. Peter has mentioned, in his cabaret patter, three of the people who drive his songs – Marion and Liza whom we know, and his grandfather George who has only been glimpsed in a childhood vignette (“Just your average Australian childhood. Granddad sitting on the verandah sewing his saddles, me


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next to him – little eight-year-old Peter – tapdancing”) and a leather joke that he can’t resist with Greg. The movement of Peter’s memories, and the show, deeper into his past, is confirmed. But more important, of course, is what he doesn’t say in the preamble, and it is that unspoken thought that we are to understand triggers the memory. The song wasn’t written for Olivia at all, but for Greg. And that little piece of unacknowledged censorship, we are to understand, ushers in the most painful consequence of love. What is at work in a writing decision like this one is not, obviously, a journeyman writer cobbling together from the materials of a biography and a song-list a show that aims to get its audience tapping their toes and even, worryingly, singing along. It’s not even to be comprehended as the work of a very good writer simply making what he can of his material to assemble an intelligent piece of theatre, since both strategies for this scene worked well. It is the work of a very good writer weighing one kind of choice (one which prioritises the moment of individual choice) against another (one which prioritises the determinative influence of experience outside the moment and the relationship, that reaches back into the formative experiences of childhood to imply, but never to state, the things that drive decisions that we hardly know that we are making). The scope of this essay isn’t conducive to a full analysis of Enright’s book for The Boy from Oz, or all of the things that make it a far superior work to all of its contemporaries in the jukebox musical genre (and, for that matter, to the virtual Hugh Jackman Show that it was soon to become). But in its final section, I want to look at several of the key choices that Enright made, in the light of the choices that he contemplated (and proposed in early drafts). In the course of even that brief analysis, I think there is much to be learned, not just about the creative processes and professional integrity of this writer, but about the ways in which artistic collaboration operates, and about how the apparently mechanical matter of problem-solving and arranging the building blocks can become, with skill and imagination, a substantial work of art.

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The choices The concert format from the beginning determined the structure of the show. Partly it was based on the performance style of Peter Allen, for better or for worse ever a solo artist; like his mother-in-law and muse, Allen offered a kind of theatre that – for all the camp iconography of incredible shirts, flashy lights and fancy footwork – made his audiences eavesdroppers in a crazy confessional. The tactic in Peter’s patter is to show us his feelings, then cover them up, “just keep it inside”, before we’ve had time to really look. It is presented as a form of flirtation, and of living dangerously. We learn very early that he’s a very practised represser, and that every song is an act of intimacy with his audience. It is the Judy Garland school of putting the life on the line, which she makes explicit early when it seems that he might spend the rest of his life pretending to be a man who never wanted to be anything other than another production-line “straight” teen idol. JUDY: Who the hell do you think you are anyway? Mr Nice Guy from Down Under. PETER: At least I turn up, I do the job. JUDY: The job, you do the job. But you never show yourself, you never show what’s here. (She indicates his heart.) You’re a great opener. But at the end of the night people want to see a human being. (The slow-clapping builds.) PETER: These people want blood. JUDY: And that’s what I give them. When I go out there, I show them where I’ve been, what’s become of me, who I am. They get the whole story. Now clear the runway […] 15

It’s quite a boon, of course, to write material for a performer whose heart is worn quite so unashamedly on his sleeve. This supposed oneman show is no comfort zone for a nostalgic tour of Peter Allen’s golden oldies; whim might take him anywhere, and the drift of the plot is driven by chance or by the ghosts that play through him. Peter, it becomes clear, is not in control – of where the show might take him, of his memories, of his life. The status of the concert shifted continually through the continual rewritings. In most of the versions it was presented as a real concert, initially set in New York (in the earliest versions notionally dated 1990, at his first performance after the Legs Diamond debacle, then at his last public appearance in 1992), later in Sydney,16 and


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finally nowhere in particular. The point that Peter has reached in the concert changes, too. The first dialogue line in the October 1996 draft is a farewell (“It’s been a great night. Thanks for coming”),17 while that in the script revised on Australia Day of the following year becomes “Welcome back to our second half”;18 finally we seem to be at the beginning of a show “some night in the late 1980s”, where Peter is setting himself for a big night that will “show them where I’ve been, what’s become of me, who I am”. The early versions have him working the house with a line in outrageous patter designed, almost literally, to lay them in the aisles: Don’t you worry, dear, I’ll be going to Rio before the night is through. And I’ll take you along. Truly, I want to see you shake those maracas. Oh, look at her! She’s blushing. She thinks I’m coming on to her. You can’t work me out, is that it, dear? People look at me up here, and they go like this one, they go “What do you think? Is he or isn’t he?” Well, dear, it’s true, yes, I am an Australian. I’m from way down under, and I still call Australia collect. Oops, Qantas will kill me. Seriously, I love Australia, and I go down as often as I can. Don’t I, girls? That’s what keeps me young.19

The revision that followed pruned this right back, though finding a way to redeploy the “is he or isn’t he” gag when he resumes chatting after Young Peter’s excited exit for his audition at the local pub: You like my shirt? They love my outfits back in the States. They can’t work out the rest of me. They look up at me and go, like, “What do you think? Is he or isn’t he?” And I tell them: “Yes, it’s true. I am an Australian”.20

In the Australian performed version, the introductory patter has almost completely disappeared, and the segue into the joke has much less of the air of an accident. This time the bridging reference to his shirt is grounded in the parallel action from the past: JOSIE: You got one chance. The front bar. Five o’clock this arvo. (He runs away excitedly.) Oh, and one tip. (He stops.) Don’t wear your school uniform.

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Nick Enright: An Actor’s Playwright (He runs home.) YOUNG PETER: Mum! Mum! I need a new shirt! PETER: Well do you like the shirt? Do you?21

It’s characteristic of Enright’s final script for the Australian tour that the concert-reality and the walking of the ghosts are brought directly into relationship. In that process the concert itself assumes a surreal quality, and the lack of specificity about time and place leaves room for uncertainty about its status. Similarly, the dreams and memories become less mysterious, less distinguishable from the world of Peter’s performance. This blurring of the boundaries between the concert hall and Peter’s imagination has important consequences for the staging of transitions in the show, and they represent a level of sophistication in Enright’s writing that is very rare in Australian music theatre – or, for that matter, in music theatre anywhere. The concept for the show initially assumed that these alternate realities would run in parallel. For the London reading in 1996, the principle was that the appearance of Young Peter was a fantasy that Peter mistook for reality; the boy simply turns up in Peter’s beach-house in Leucadia, Southern California, and listens unobserved to Peter singing ‘If You Were Wondering’: (He discovers a twelve-year-old boy watching him. The boy wears summer pyjamas.) YOUNG PETER: That’s a pretty song. PETER: Who the fuck are you? How did you get in, kid? YOUNG PETER: What a beautiful view. Is that the ocean? I’ve never seen the ocean. PETER: Then, this is your lucky day. You’re not from round here. YOUNG PETER: No. PETER: Well, click your heels three times and you’ll get back to Kansas. YOUNG PETER: I saw that picture. It was beaut. But this isn’t Oz. There’s no ocean in Oz. PETER: No, there’s not. What’s your name, kid? YOUNG PETER: Peter. Peter Woolnough. What’s your name? PETER: Peter. My name’s Peter, too. Cute pyjamas.22

In this version, Peter only recognises the hallucination when his woman friend Jackie (a substantial character who fell out of the script


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later in that year) enters, and he realises that she can’t see the boy in the room at all. It’s a neat and quirky convention that was discarded through subsequent drafts, where Peter was made a silent observer of his child-self, reinforcing the separateness of the two orders of reality. In the show’s final Australian version, though, the two Peters simply coincide, and the reality is a composite one; the method of transition between their worlds, to borrow a cinematic analogy, changes from jump-cut to montage. They don’t speak until the end, and the context of their brief exchange is critical. The gunshot, the repressed memory that has been kept at bay for two hours of stage time, is finally allowed into the action, and naming it allows the bicoastal adult to recognise and be reconciled with the little boy from Oz that he has until now been afraid to acknowledge: YOUNG PETER: Who are you? PETER: My name’s Peter. Peter Allen. YOUNG PETER: My name’s Peter, too. Peter Woolnough. PETER: Why are you crying, Peter? YOUNG PETER: I’m not. I got to go. PETER: No, wait. Come here. Peter, you will have a wonderful life. There’ll be good bits and bad bits, but you will make the most of every moment. You will tell your life like a story and it’ll be a real adventure. Off you go […] (Young PETER follows his mother.)23

Peter the grown-up moves immediately to ‘Tenterfield Saddler’, and the opening line of the song “The late George Woolnough worked on High Street” confirms, in the acceptance of his name, his connection with the person he was. In one sense the structural model is one based on therapy – that by revisiting the trauma it can be dealt with; but more broadly the movement of the show is toward selfacceptance. Peter Allen, whose performance identity and name were bestowed on him by a bonehead as half of a Brothers act with a stranger, and who began his career as an Everly clone, is understood at the end to have learned to be himself. The show is carefully patterned to show that development, in terms of his music, his sexuality, his stage persona and his ways of dealing with the people, alive and dead, who are part of his story. Whatever the claims of The Boy from Oz to be “the Great Australian Musical”, the book crafted through its long developmental

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process is work of very high quality, and convincingly better than the arena show that has now effectively replaced it. Peter Allen’s life and music came to Nick Enright, in one sense, pre-packaged. But the way in which the pieces were arranged to deepen Allen’s story emotionally, and to find psychological patterns in it, took it way beyond the standard territory of the jukebox musical. It confirms Enright’s position as a major figure in Australian musical theatre.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6

7

8

9

10 11

See, for example, Hallett 1998; Le Petit 1998; Payne 1998; Woods 1998; McLean 1999; Scott 1999; Thomson 1999; Nunn 2000; Bamigboye 2000. Enright papers, MS 51, Series 4–16, Folder 1. I am indebted to the Librarian, Ms Wilgah Edwards, for her help in negotiating it. The discussion below of shifting creative strategies in Enright’s book for The Boy from Oz is based almost entirely on the manuscripts in this collection. ‘Notes’ p. 1. Enright papers, MS 51, Folder 13. Ibid. ‘Notes’ p. 4. Enright papers, MS 51, Folder 13. The Broadway version added ‘The Lives of Me’ to open the show, ‘Love Crazy’, ‘Come Save Me’, ‘You and Me’, ‘Once Before I Go’, and expanded the place of ‘Bicoastal’ from its vestigial presence in the audition scene to become the Act Two opener. ‘Sure Thing Baby’ and ‘Tenterfield Saddler’ were omitted, as was ‘Pretty Keen Teen’, the Allen Brothers’ cover version which was the only song in Enright’s script in which Peter Allen had not been involved in writing. Enright wrote ten other musicals: The Venetian Twins (with Terence Clarke), 1979; On the Wallaby, 1980; Buckleys! (with Glenn Hendrich, David Allen and Ariette Taylor), 1981; Variations (with Terence Clarke), 1982; Orlando Rourke (with Alan John), 1985; Mary Bryant (with David King), 1988; Summer Rain (with Terence Clarke), 1989; The Betrothed (with David King), 1993; Miracle City (with Max Lambert), 1996; The Good Fight (with David King), 2002. Though Dick Woolnough kills himself with a rifle in all versions of The Boy from Oz, Enright withholds some of the traumatic force of the incident itself – partly by placing it off-stage, but also by avoiding the gory details of the actual event, in which thirteen-year-old Peter and his mother Marion had to clean up the blood and mess in the bedroom themselves, shortly before the landlord chose to evict them. The Almost Totally Fictitious Musical History of Legs Diamond, written in 1988 by Allen (with book by Harvey Fienstein and Charles Suppon), and starring Allen in the lead role, was one of Broadway’s more spectacular flops. Production script, p. 27 For a broader discussion of the genre and its implications for the Australian musical, see my own article ‘Whose Turn to Shout? The Crisis in Australian Musical Theatre’, 2001.

Life or a Cabaret?: The Boy from Oz 12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

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The single exception in Enright’s original version was ‘Pretty Keen Teen’, which reflected the Allen Brothers’ attempt to replicate Don and Phil Everly; Enright saw its place in the show as anomalous, though, and urged its replacement by an Allen original for the American run. The Sherman script recognised the validity of the principle by substituting ‘Love Crazy’, and then violated it in the same scene by adding a gratuitous chorus of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Pre-production script, 18 April 1997. Enright papers, MS 51, Folder 7, p. 32. Production script, as at 26 September 1999. For this copy of the script I am indebted to Robyn Arthur, who played the roles of Josie Mann (the pub owner) and Valerie Anthony (wife of The Great Producer) for the premiere season in Australia. Very similar versions are held in Enright papers, MS 51, Folders 10 and 11. Production script, p. 18. Pre-production script, October/November 1997, Enright papers, MS 51, Folder 8. Draft script, October 1996, Enright papers, MS 51, Folder 4. Draft script, 26 January 1997, Enright papers, MS 51, Folder 5. Draft script, 18 April 1997, Enright papers, MS 51, Folder 7. Pre-production script, October/November 1997, Enright papers, MS 51, Folder 8. Production script, p. 3. “Five o’clock this arvo” replaced the original “Six o’clock tonight” in the script’s developing emphasis on a distinctive Australian vernacular. In the same way, Wally Bell, who invented the Allen Brothers, is transformed from “an overbearing end-of-the pier English entertainer” to the kind of gruff Aussie bloke who says things like “Can youse do all that, fair dinkum?”. Draft for London reading, 17 May 1996. Enright papers MS 51, Folder 2. Production script, p. 51. The fact that Peter recognises the name he was born with, but doesn’t reveal his identity to the boy, is a much more plausible convention than the implication in the London reading that he has forgotten completely who he once was.

Works cited Manuscript materials Nick Enright papers, Australian Defence Force Academy Library, MS 51. The materials for The Boy from Oz comprise Series 4–16.

Reviews of The Boy from Oz Bamigboye, Baz. 2000. ‘Boy, This Puts Oz on the Map’, ‘It’s Friday’ column in Daily Mail (7 January 2000): 13. Feingold, Michael. 2003. ‘Wherever Broadway’s Fault Lies, Dear Brutus, It Is Not in Our Stars’ in The Village Voice (22–28 October 2003): 15. Gross, Michael Joseph. 2003. ‘The Boy From Oz You Won’t Meet on Broadway’ in The New York Times (5 October 2003): 44. Hallett, Bryce. 1998. ‘Boy Lights Up Even If It’s Not Broadway or Bust’ in The Weekend Australian (7–8 March 1998): 12.

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Le Petit, Paul. 1998. ‘Toes Go Tapping from Oz to Rio’ in The Sunday Telegraph (8 March 1998): 191. McLean, Sandra. 1999. ‘The Boy from Oz’ in The Courier Mail (13 January 1999): 8. Nunn, Louise. 2000. ‘The Boy from Oz’ in Advertiser (5 January 2000): 11. Payne, Pamela. 1998. ‘Boy, Oh Boy!’ in The Sun-Herald (8 March 1998): 22. Scott, Eric. 1999. ‘Big Hand for the Boy from Oz’ in Catholic Leader (January 1999): 5. Thomson, Helen. 1999. ‘No Need to Go to Rio for a World-class Show’ in The Age (24 May 1999): 11. Woods, Mark. 1998. ‘The Boy from Oz’ in Variety (March 1998): 21.

Published articles Enright, Nick. 2003. ‘Collaboration and Community’. Seventh Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture, delivered 24 November 2002, in Australasian Drama Studies 42 (April): 14–25. Fitzpatrick, Peter. 2001. ‘Whose Turn to Shout? The Crisis in Australian Musical Theatre’ in Australasian Drama Studies 38 (April): 16–28. Parr, Bruce. 1996. Review of Good Works in Australasian Drama Studies 29 (October): 216–220.

Chapter 3 Masculinity, Guilt and the Moral Failures of the Body: Nick Enright’s Screenplays Susan Lever Abstract Most of Nick Enright’s screenplays were adaptations from other texts, or the telling of other people’s stories, and he wrote the award-winning scripts for Lorenzo’s Oil and Come in Spinner in collaboration with other writers. Nevertheless, all of Enright’s screenplays function like morality plays, asking questions about individual responsibility and the values of contemporary society. Often the moral questions focus on the body, particularly of a woman or child. In Come in Spinner, the women must deal with the implications of their sexual bodies; in Lorenzo’s Oil, the disintegrating body of Lorenzo Odone is central; in Blackrock, the dead and raped body of the girl lies behind a boy’s guilt; in ‘Coral Island’ Martin confronts AIDS. In each case, physical decline or destruction presents some moral crisis, particularly a central male character’s sense of guilt. This chapter examines the way that Enright allows these individual physical crises to reflect on the moral state of society. It gives particular attention to Lorenzo’s Oil and the complex way that Enright and Miller present conflicting aspects of attitudes to the body and the mind, the intellect and humanity.

Though trained as a stage dramatist, Nick Enright also had remarkable critical success writing for the screen. In Australia, he won a Logie and an Australian Film Institute (AFI) award for the television series, Come in Spinner, and several Australian Writers’ Guild AWGIE awards for the film, Blackrock. The screenplay for Lorenzo’s Oil was nominated for a Writers’ Guild of America award and an Academy Award in 1992: that year Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game won the Academy Award for best script, over an extraordinary field that also included Woody Allen’s script for Husbands and Wives, Michael Tolkin’s for The Player and David Webb Peoples’ for Unforgiven. Most of Enright’s screenplays were adaptations from other texts, or the telling of other people’s stories, and he wrote scripts in collaboration with other writers (Come in Spinner with Lissa Benyon and Lorenzo’s Oil with George Miller), so their success may be read

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as further evidence of his brilliant craftsmanship applied to the ideas or experiences of other people. The following analysis refers to both film versions and some screenplays. All of these screenplays are concerned with moral issues, with what it means to be a good person in our society, and his one screenplay written alone and based on his own experience, ‘Coral Island’ (for the Naked series on Australian Broadcasting Commission television), supports the view that he wanted to explore moral aspects of contemporary society, whether through other people’s stories or his own. When interviewed about Blackrock, Enright commented that he saw television and film as the “natural place for the discussion of sexual, political and social issues” (Burchall 1993). Clearly, he was aware that the wider audiences for film and television meant that a screenplay could address shared community issues, such as male violence or responses to AIDS. All of Enright’s produced screenplays, whether adaptations, collaborative efforts or original works, engage with a familiar present-day world where ordinary individuals must make difficult moral decisions. They may be considered contemporary morality plays, exploring individual responsibility and its relationship to wider social values. Enright’s screenplays worry about the responsibilities of parents to their children and children to their parents, the guilt that these relationships may bring, and the way that bodily failure may be misinterpreted as a sign of moral failure. His characters must make their moral decisions in societies that are usually corrupt or negligent to some degree. Come in Spinner takes place amidst the frenetic hedonism of a Sydney hotel during wartime; the parents in Lorenzo’s Oil confront a scientific establishment driven by a rationalist rather than humane logic; in Blackrock, Jared faces his moral crisis in a society where adults demonstrate sexual carelessness; and the men who return to their school in ‘Coral Island’ endorse the values of a money-driven society. In Come in Spinner, Enright’s first produced television play, each of the women working in the wartime beauty salon makes decisions about sexuality in relation to the prevailing moral climate. Claire’s affair with a married man ends in her pregnancy and death from an abortion; Deb ultimately decides for the material comfort of marriage with the wealthy Angus McFarland rather than a return to rural poverty with her happy-go-lucky but insensitive soldier husband;

Masculinity, Guilt and the Moral Failures of the Body: Screenplays

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Guinea wavers between the flattery of the American colonel and her childhood sweetheart before settling for the Australian. The television production exploits the glamour of this historical period – the women’s elaborate hairstyles and fashions, the jazz music, the uniforms of the men – with only a token acknowledgement that this decadence feeds off the struggles of those at war. It appears to offer a 1990s perspective on Dymphna Cusack and Florence James’s 1940s novel. While the novel was satirical about the hotel’s upper class clientele, the television show is merely comic. Whereas the novel campaigned for legal abortion by allowing a young and inexperienced woman to die, the television series transfers this fate to the mature and sophisticated Claire, knowing that its audience lives in the world of legal abortion. Its women are freer to make decisions than are the characters in the novel, and the television show endorses their right to do so, especially given the evident weakness of their men. In this way, the television version not only represents an aspect of the war, it also becomes a statement about women’s freedom since then, and the changed attitudes to women’s bodies. Though the television show does not moralise about the women’s decisions, it does present them as difficult and significant. Claire’s decision leads to her death, Deb’s will affect her daughter as well as her husband. Guinea alone pretends to be a free spirit by proposing that the toss of a coin will decide her fate, but goes against the coin’s decision anyway. Come in Spinner gave Enright an existing plot and characters to work with, and four episodes of a television series to explore dramatic crises, but Lorenzo’s Oil presented much greater challenges. The story of Augusto and Michaela Odone’s fight to save the life of their son, Lorenzo, from a lethal disease needed to remain faithful to events and living characters, and to the laws of biochemistry. The film’s director, George Miller, a medical doctor by training, was attracted to the story because it demonstrated that intelligent amateurs could challenge the complacency of the medical profession. He worked with Enright to develop the script, and Enright gave Miller credit for teaching him to modify his more theatrical tendencies. He told Bryce Hallett that, working with Miller, he “learnt to restrain his familiar urges for theatrical melodrama by taking an intense and methodical line”. Miller taught him the importance of putting “the audience in the centre of a work” (1993: 10), rather than directing their emotions and thoughts. Enright told Sandra Hall that, at first, he wanted “to get [the science]

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over fast then get down to writing about people screaming at one another, which is all I was ever trained to do; but George stopped me” (1993: 87). Lorenzo’s Oil is an extraordinary film in its attempts to include its audience in the intellectual as well as emotional and moral struggle of its characters. It is difficult to find any film that gives comparable attention to an intellectual and moral real-life crisis – Dead Man Walking (1995), also starring Susan Sarandon, presents a similar commitment to the complex morality of a real-life story, but does not require the same level of intellectual engagement. Somehow the Lorenzo’s Oil script had to explain the basic cause of Lorenzo’s disease, adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), and then assist the audience through the process of understanding how the Odones developed an oil to confine its effects. The story became one of empowering ordinary people against the impenetrable obscurities of medical science; the audience needed to learn, with the Odones, in order to share this sense of empowerment. Enright and Miller manage this by some clear schoolteacherly analogies. In several scenes, Augusto Odone (played by Nick Nolte) uses a whiteboard to show the effects of diet on the level of longchain fatty acids in Lorenzo’s blood. In another, he uses two paperclip chains to represent the two different kinds of chemical chains, and his breakthrough comes in a halfwaking dream when he realises that the chains are linked to each other. The film refuses to soften any of the effects of ALD or any of the attempted cures on the tiny body of Lorenzo, who quickly declines from a healthy five-year-old to a wobbling scarecrow, to an immobile and paralyzed figure in a bed. It emphasises the speed of this decline by announcing the dates since diagnosis at regular points in the film. The Odones are racing against Lorenzo’s predicted life expectancy of two years beyond diagnosis, and this drives the film’s narrative. It also emphasises the personal guilts surrounding Lorenzo’s disease. The Odones are Catholics and Michaela (played by Susan Sarandon) has waited ten years to marry the previously married Augusto with church approval. When they visit the specialist to learn about Lorenzo’s prognosis, he brutally tells Michaela that she is the source of the gene that condemns Lorenzo to paralysis. The film presents Michaela’s desire to find a cure for the disease as being driven as much by her sense of irrational guilt that she carries this


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gene, as by her maternal instincts. At certain points in the film, we are reminded that Michaela’s body is the source of the disease and, under stress, Augusto tells her: “You blame everybody but yourself and your poisoned blood”. The boy’s father proves to have the intellectual capacity to find a way to ameliorate Lorenzo’s symptoms, but his mother bears the emotional weight of the film. She is often depicted in Madonna-like tableaux with her son, and her concern becomes an obsession as the disease progresses. In scene after scene, she rejects her family when they try to intervene or dismisses staff when they suggest that Lorenzo would be better in a hospice than at home. Terence Rafferty describes her as a “spiritual outlaw” obsessed by the need to punish herself for her faulty body (1993: 101). Ultimately, the dogged intelligence of Augusto triumphs in finding and producing the oil, but it is Michaela’s emotional conviction that keeps him to his task. This, I think, is Enright territory: the misplaced guilt for physical failing and the extreme actions that follow it. At various points in the film, a more sensible and conventional perspective is offered – Professor Nikolais points out that more children die in the USA from choking on French fries than from ALD, and Michaela’s sister Deidre warns the Odones about the strain on their marriage and their finances. On a visit to the Odones, Ellard (played by James Rebhorn) and Loretta Muscatine (played by Ann Hearn), the leaders of the ALD support society and parents of two boys with the disease, tell the Odones that they’re glad that their first son was taken quickly and they don’t want their second son to linger on with increasing paralysis. This scene offers clear evidence of the discipline of the film’s writing. Here, the emotionally expressive Odones, educated and cosmopolitan, are contrasted with the Muscatines, reserved Southerners. Augusto advocates that parents engage in a “dialectic” with the doctors, and this signals the dialectic approach the writers are using at this point. The Odones have found that the oil has relieved Lorenzo’s symptoms and want to pass this information on to other parents. The Muscatines are cautious in response to the emotionalism of the Odones, particularly Augusto’s Italian passion. When pressed, Ellard describes the death of his first son, and the lingering condition of his second with barely checked emotion. The camera sits close to the faces of Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon when they speak, then turns

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to give equally close attention to the expressions of James Rebhorn and Ann Hearn. Whenever the camera is on the Odones, a small window is visible into the room where a nurse is bending over Lorenzo. Rather than offer judgements on the positions of the two families, the film presents the viewer with the Odones’ excitement about their discovery, and the Muscatines’ suffering and suspicion, with the reality of the condition of the paralyzed boys firmly in view. In this way, the film presents the main concerns of the argument directly to the audience. The Muscatines express a practical and humane view of the situation, but we know the details of the Odones’ discoveries and share their frustration with the Muscatines’ resistance. The film works by offering these kind of balanced oppositions. It contrasts the institutional elitism and competitiveness of medical experts with the caring love of a family, the rationalism of science with the emotional obsession of Lorenzo’s parents. Even the problem of Lorenzo’s best interests – whether to be allowed to die quickly or to linger paralyzed as his parents cling to his life – is presented in dialectic terms. The achievement of the film lies in the way that it avoids the sentimental simplicity of portraying the Odones as uncomplicated good people fighting a villainous medical world and an unfair physical condition. They make decisions to prolong their son’s life for mixed reasons, and the grotesque figure of Lorenzo struggling for breath in the front room puts the darker implications of this constantly before us. Hope must lie beyond the single case of Lorenzo, and the film ends with a collage of videos, of home movie quality, of boys with ALD playing and living their lives – it is suggested as a result of Lorenzo’s oil. Lorenzo Odone himself died in 2008, outliving both his parents. At the time of the film’s release, the medical experts objected to the its suggestion that the Odones had found a miracle oil that could cure ALD; my copy of Halliwell’s Film Guide (2004) even has a health warning on its entry for the film (510). As recently as 13 July 2005, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Archives of Neurology presented clinical findings that the oil does indeed prevent the development of symptoms in some boys and should be the standard treatment for young boys with the disease who have not yet shown symptoms (‘Expert Admits He Was Wrong’). Lorenzo’s Oil is a remarkably tough and intellectual film unashamed of its references to high culture and its implicit valuing of


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the Odones’ education and intelligence. It’s also quite harrowing to watch, because it refuses to soften the physical suffering of the boy at its centre or to sentimentalise his ferocious mother. Only the beautiful picture-making and the classical music of its soundtrack ameliorate the suffering on screen. From time to time, though, the film reinforces its moral story by some melodramatic crises and exaggerated playing. It’s easy to understand that the late Dr Hugo Moser, the model for Professor Nikolais, took offence at his portrayal, when the film often sets him up to represent a complacent medical establishment. Michaela Odone’s handwritten annotations to the screenplay held in the Australian Defence Force Academy Library collection protest that a number of scenes have been written to fit dramatic rather than reallife events (Enright papers, Box 51, Folder 4). The script, however, can hardly be accused of simplifying the moral issues. The Odones are good people, but they make decisions about their son that most of us would not make. Few of us, of course, would have the intellectual capacity to learn the science for ourselves, but the film allows us to feel that we, too, might be able to challenge its authority. In a sense, the film shares in the Odones’ heroism both by promoting their findings and enduring condemnation by medical researchers. Enright clearly responded to the patterns of guilt and responsibility in the story, and the difficult personal decision-making that appears so often in his other work. He is interested in the way that his characters bear their sense of guilt for bodily failure, regardless of whether it is justified. Lorenzo’s Oil addresses this guilt for physical misfortune directly through the anguish of Michaela Odone, though the parallels with AIDS are obvious and intentional. After the success of Lorenzo’s Oil, Enright began work on other screenplays for American films. But, as Sandy Gore has explained, his experience with the unproduced Halfway Home convinced him that he belonged in Australia writing for the stage rather than in Hollywood (see Chapter 13). Nevertheless, he wrote screenplays for other Australian projects that were never produced, such as Raggedy Eileen, a children’s television play about the pianist Eileen Joyce, and The World Underneath, about the convicts Mary and William Bryant, for Warner Brothers.1 Following his success with the Theatre-in-Education play A Property of the Clan, and its fuller stage adaptation as Blackrock,

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Enright’s friend, Steven Vidler, approached him to adapt it as a film screenplay that Vidler would direct. Once again a real story provided the source material for the film – though Blackrock has moved further into fiction from the murder of Leigh Leigh that instigated A Property of the Clan. Enright found the material difficult, and was aware of his own outsider status in writing about teenage boys. He commented on his research for A Property of the Clan: “Here I was, a middle-class, 42-year-old gay male, and I’m suddenly dealing with working-class heterosexual teenagers, facing ugly, primal, violent extremes; the hatred that is such a large part of male sexual violence” (Burchall 1993). He decided to focus the screenplay on Jared, a boy who has not participated in the rape but fails to help the victim on the beach on the night of the murder. This allows the film to explore more complex moral territory than the condemnation of the rapists, and to avoid the risk of exploiting the horror of the girl’s death. Instead it concentrates on Jared’s sense of guilt and responsibility, and the milieu in which he lives. In the course of the film, Jared’s guilt becomes not only individual and circumstantial, but also a more generalised male guilt for misogyny and mistreatment of women. The film carefully sets up the milieu of working-class urban Australia. We glimpse Jared’s mother, Diane, socialising in the kind of tawdry club atmosphere that is commonly satirised or celebrated in Australian film (High Tide 1987, Strictly Ballroom 1992, Clubland 2007). We also see the more middle-class photographer father of Jared’s girlfriend mistreating his models. The brief scene where Jared’s father appears at the boxing gym also suggests an adult world that offers little moral support to the teenagers. The social atmosphere of Jared’s town is misogynist, and women’s bodies bear the damage, with Tracy found raped and dead on the beach. Diane’s breast cancer emphasises the sexualised but mortal bodies of women, and seems to represent a maternal burden of guilt for Jared, and for men in general. Felicity Holland and Jane O’Sullivan find that the decision to give Diane breast cancer in Blackrock (it is not an element in A Property of the Clan) implies a judgement on her “flawed parenting” and may even serve as “a kind of prurient metaphor for maternal loss” (Holland and O’Sullivan 1999: 83). They read the film as using women’s suffering as “a vehicle for the exploration of a young man’s Angst”, and see the film as “a deeply conservative and rather dangerous


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contribution to popular Australian urban myths of gender and class” (83). Blackrock directly addresses the misogyny that sometimes appears integral to Australian mateship, and presents rape and murder as the possibilities lurking behind the cheerful acceptance of such misogyny. But it does not simply condemn men as brutal oppressors of women; it attempts to understand the way that young men participate in the abuse of women as part of male bonding. Some of its original educational function is evident in the way it tries to offer alternatives to young men, by following Jared’s final acceptance of his mate’s criminality and decision to speak out. This focus is not so much a determined erasure of women, as the critics claim, that makes the film somehow complicit with misogyny, as a desire to teach young men the implications of their casual, matey mistreatment of women. As a counterbalance, the film attempts to give a voice to women through Diane’s role and the anger of Tracy’s schoolgirl friends, but this can’t ameliorate the crime at its centre – the dead and abused girl. This crime, and the audience’s knowledge that it is based on an actual death, may make its concerns about young men appear evasive and even trivialising. If Enright was uncomfortable with the material for Blackrock, he was on much more familiar territory with a commission for the ABC TV series Naked, produced by Jan Chapman in 1995. His episode for the series, ‘Coral Island’, drew on his own experiences at the Jesuit boys’ school, St Ignatius Riverview in Sydney – and was filmed on location there. About this time, too, Enright worked as editor on Timothy Conigrave’s posthumously published autobiography, Holding the Man, that details a love affair between two Catholic schoolboys, and the death of one of them from AIDS (Tommy Murphy’s stage adaptation of Holding the Man had a longrunning success in 2006–2007). In ‘Coral Island’, the main character Martin returns to his Catholic boys’ school for a reunion dinner, and remembers his schoolboy experiences in a series of flashbacks. Like Enright, Martin was the scholarship boy, the intellectual and debater, and he recalls his difficulties with the sporting bullies and his infatuation with the sophisticated Julian. But adulthood has turned these boys into scheming businessmen. Julian arrives late to the dinner only to give his attention to the rich men who might invest in his current business

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deal, a holiday resort called Coral Island. Their old teacher, Father Dunfee, expresses his disgust with the way his former charges have adopted the prevailing materialist social values: “This society rewards the greedy, the venal, the ruthless. It’s a world we’ve all made, even those who are not entrepreneurs.” Enright seems to share Father Dunfee’s view of the prevailing values of the Australian middle class in the 1990s. Like his play St James Infirmary, ‘Coral Island’ presents the masculine culture of the Catholic school as being brutal and bound by hypocrisy. In such a culture, Martin has hidden his homosexuality – he has married and fathered a son. It is only that he has AIDS, the disease that will lead to bodily failure that forces it into the open. The screenplay emphasises that for all its claims to spiritual training, the school has replicated the materialistic values of the society. The conventional morality of the Catholic boys’ school has not only encouraged sexual hypocrisy but it has supported the kind of bullying that dominates the wider middleclass Australian society. When Martin asks Father Dunfee about his own “inner life” the priest takes off his pyjama top and shows his operation scars. Both men are probably dying – their “inner life” is literally inside their dying bodies. Once again Enright explores the relationship between morality and an understanding of physical failure, though here the morally noble characters are the ones bearing physical disease. Martin’s disease might appear, at first, to be a kind of vengeance for sexual unconformity, punishing him for his failure to live out the masculine heterosexual ideals of the school. But the screenplay makes it explicit that, in his case, secrecy and hypocrisy have led to a failure of love; it is not his homosexuality but the forced denial of it that have maimed him. The school’s ideals of masculinity have disabled the men’s emotions. Martin suffers guilt, especially in his relationship with his son, Sean, whom he tells: “When you live a secret, you learn to cover up everything. Everything stays under wraps. I never showed you anything.” I’ve called these screenplays morality plays, though the traditional morality play punishes evil and rewards virtue. Enright acknowledges that contemporary life is more likely to afflict the virtuous with physical suffering and reward the greedy with material wealth. In each of these plays, sexuality brings physical consequences (rape, death from abortion, AIDS, the genetic heritage of disease) and


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Enright’s central characters often behave as if the physical condition is a manifestation of their own moral failure. His screenplays negotiate these irrational feelings of guilt and treat them seriously as a source of moral self-reflection. But the wider society usually creates conditions that force these feelings onto individuals. Evil in the screenplays is not so much an individual responsibility as a social one, in a society that values masculine power, wealth, competition and a cold rationality. These screenplays may be considered as part of a critique of the values promoted as masculine in contemporary society. This critique is, of course, explicit in both Blackrock and ‘Coral Island’ where the central characters are men. In Come in Spinner, the weakness and irresponsibility of men force the women to take responsibility for their own lives. In Lorenzo’s Oil, however, Augusto Odone takes on the responsibility of father and carer, using his intelligence and education to find hope for his family’s problem. If Michaela represents the feminine maternal principle of emotional and physical defence of her child, Augusto clearly shows the possibilities for a masculine paternal commitment to the humane use of the intellect. In this screenplay, at least, Enright was able to offer a masculine model for moral behaviour; here, the discipline and logic of the father’s mind combine with the emotional commitment of the mother to achieve the care of their child, and other children. Screenplays, however complex the ideas, are written to entertain audiences. In each of these screenplays, Enright manages to present relatively complex moral situations within strict genre limitations. Audiences for Come in Spinner may have enjoyed watching the beautiful women with their 1940s outfits and listening to Wendy Mathews and Vince Jones performing favourite jazz numbers from the era, but they still had to think about the decisions the women characters were making. Blackrock, as a number of critics have noted, fits an established Australian genre about working-class life on the edges of our cities (Brien 1999; Holland and O’Sullivan 1999); it offers the necessary melodramatic moments and observations of working class teenage culture while seeking out its moral crisis. The Naked series provided a rare opportunity for a more literary television production; ‘Coral Island’ applied theatrical techniques to television, taking advantage of the possibility for flashbacks, but working in similar territory to Good Works.

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Enright’s handful of produced screenplays have literary and theatrical qualities that suggest he felt more comfortable with the expressive representation of the stage, but they remind us how rarely film and television pursue the intellectual, social and moral possibilities of their genre. In the stage plays Enright wrote in the 1990s, particularly Good Works and A Man With Five Children, it is possible to see the influence of film and television on his own practice, as he explored the use of film projection to add new perspectives to his plays.

Notes 1

Like most screenwriters, Enright wrote many scripts that remain unproduced. The Enright collection at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) Library includes drafts for Johnno (adapted from David Malouf’s novel 1986–1987), Danny Riordan (with Ned Manning and George Ogilvie, 1988–1993), Raggedy Eileen (1990–1993), Kindred (commissioned by Touchstone Pictures, 1992), The World Underneath (1992), Halfway Home (based on the novel by Paul Monette, 1993–1994) The Wordmaker (with George Ogilvie, based on Peter Kocan’s novels The Treatment and The Cure, 1993–1997), The Panelbeaters (with Steven Vidler, 1998), and Bennelong which was in development at the time he died.

Works cited Source material Cusack, Dymphna and Florence James. 1951. Come in Spinner, London: Heinemann. Enright, Nicholas. 1995. Coral Island. Screenplay, Jan Chapman Productions, 1995. (Courtesy of Hilary Linstead Associates) —— 1997. Blackrock: The Screenplay. Currency Press, Sydney. —— Papers, Australian Defence Force Academy Library, MS 51.

Films and television scripts Come in Spinner. 1990. Directed by Robert Marchand, ABC. Lorenzo’s Oil. 1992. Directed by George Miller, Kennedy Miller/Universal. Blackrock. 1995. Directed by Steven Vidler, Polygram/Beyond Films. ‘Coral Island’. 1995. Episode 5 of Naked series. Directed by Neil Armfield, produced by Jan Chapman, ABC.

Criticism Anon. 2005. ‘Expert Admits He Was Wrong on Wonder Oil That Inspired Film’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (13 July 2005): 9. Brien, Donna Lee. 1999. ‘Urban Shocks and Local Scandals: Blackrock and the Problem of Australian True-crime Fiction’ in De Groen, Fran and Ken Stewart


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(eds) Australian Writing and the City. Proceedings of ASAL conference, Sydney, 1999: 115–121. Burchall, Greg. 1993. ‘Writing with Violence on the Brain’ in The Age Arts and Entertainment (29 March 1993): 14. Decent, Campion. 1993. ‘Lorenzo’s Oil: Hope vs Establishment’ in the Sydney Star Observer (19 March 1993): 28. Gore, Sandy. 2005. ‘Nick Enright: Friend’. (See Chapter 13). Hall, Sandra. 1993. ‘Doctor Ducks the Quacks’ in The Bulletin (16 February 1993): 87. Hallett, Bryce. 1993. ‘Enright in the Spotlight’ in The Weekend Australian Review (20–21 March 1993): 10. Holland, Felicity and Jane O’Sullivan. 1999. ‘“Lethal Larrikins”: Cinematic Subversions of Mythical Masculinities in Blackrock and The Boys’ in Antipodes December: 70–84. Rafferty, Terence. 1993. ‘Force of Nature’ in The New Yorker (11 January 1993): 101. Ryan, Tom. 1993. ‘Miller’s Tale a Triumph of Hope’ in T he Sunday Age Agenda (21 February 1993): 7. Walker, John (ed.) 2003. Halliwell’s Film Video and DVD Guide 2004. London: HarperCollins.

Chapter 4 The Collaboration Process: Nick Enright and Justin Monjo’s Adaptation of Cloudstreet 1 Jack Teiwes Abstract Nick Enright said that collaboration was one of his favourite aspects of the theatrical process, and it is only fitting that one of the high points of his career was the collaborative experience of adapting Tim Winton’s novel Cloudstreet to the stage. Working in partnership with his former student Justin Monjo, Enright created a rare piece of theatre which came to be hailed by many critics and patrons alike as the most significant Australian play since Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. A phenomenal success upon its opening at the 1998 Festival of Sydney, Enright and Monjo’s Cloudstreet proceeded to tour Australia and overseas to great acclaim over the next three years. In this chapter I assess the play from conception through to its final revisions for subsequent remountings of the production, and the involvement of other contributors in a deliberately collaborative process. Enright described it as “[t]echnically […] the most difficult thing I’ve done”, and he and Monjo worked closely with director Neil Armfield and a workshop of actors to help shape the piece, ultimately producing a text of enormous theatrical complexity. Inevitably, the process of adaptation involved various omissions, additions and minor changes as necessitated by the demands of theatre. Close textual analysis, however, demonstrates how some subtle yet important changes were made, resulting in a play which altered some of the ideological implications and emphases from those of the original novel. In particular, critics disagreed about the dramatic portrayal of a nostalgic vision of Australian nationhood and the reframing of gestures of Reconciliation.

In retrospect it is hard for the outsider to imagine that for the months, weeks and even hours before Nick Enright and Justin Monjo’s stage adaptation of Tim Winton’s hugely popular novel Cloudstreet opened in the 1998 Sydney Festival, several of those involved were seriously concerned that the show would be the biggest “turkey” of their careers (Wright 1998; Horsburgh 1999; Monjo 2004). It would prove to be quite the contrary, as the production was nothing short of an outright

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triumph, and was regarded at the time as “[o]ne of the most successful productions in Australian theatre history” (Hallett 2000). The co-production of Sydney’s Company B Belvoir and Perth’s Black Swan Theatre found wide critical and popular success, with sold-out seasons in Australian state capitals as well as a handful of European and American venues. The production garnered Enright and Monjo the 1999 gold AWGIE by the Australian Writers’ Guild, and five Green Room Awards in 2000 for best Direction (Neil Armfield), Design (set, costumes and lighting), Male Actor in a Featured Role (Max Cullen), Outstanding Ensemble Playing by a Cast of Actors, and Best New Australian Play (Enright and Monjo). Cloudstreet was so beloved in Australia that some patrons who had missed out in their own city or simply wanted to see it again actually flew interstate in order to do so (Usher 1998; Rees 1997). Although both a co-authored script and an adaptation as opposed to an original play, Cloudstreet was nevertheless one of Nick Enright’s great achievements, and serves as perhaps the greatest example of his belief in the value of collaboration. Getting together and pitching the project The story of Enright’s involvement with Cloudstreet actually begins with one of his former students, Justin Monjo. An expatriate New Yorker, Monjo had moved to Australia on a grant to study as an actor at Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and had the good fortune of having Enright as his acting teacher (Monjo 2004; Nightingale 2001). The two established a friendship that would extend beyond their time at NIDA, although probably not in a way either would have anticipated. When Monjo acted in Sam Shephard’s Lie of the Mind at Belvoir Street, he received a copy of Winton’s novel That Eye, the Sky as a gift from the company, and gave it to his wife to read. In the meantime, he had begun a parallel career as a writer establishing a company called Burning House, with Richard Roxburgh, another friend from NIDA. They were initially at a loss for a play, but Monjo found the text he was looking for in that same copy of That Eye, the S k y recommended by his wife. In 1994 Monjo and Roxburgh collaborated on a stage adaptation of the book with the latter also directing, and this production toured Australia to relative acclaim, including that of Winton himself. So impressed was Nick Enright with

The Collaboration Process: Cloudstreet

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the adaptation that he told Monjo that he would love to collaborate with him on a future project (Monjo 2004; Price 1997). During this period, Winton’s Cloudstreet was published and became a bestseller, so adapting it to the stage seemed an obvious progression after the success of That Eye, the Sky. Burning House, however, was a small operation, hardly equipped to develop a production of such size, much less stage it, and early discussions raising the possibility of a Burning House co-production with Perth’s Black Swan Theatre Company were short-lived. That Eye, the Sky proved to be Burning House’s one and only production. Taking Enright up on his earlier offer of collaboration, Monjo proposed that they adapt Cloudstreet together. Monjo knew at the time he would need someone with a reputation like Enright’s to give such a large undertaking adequate credibility to attract financing. They in turn needed the stature of Neil Armfield, “the best director in Australia” (Monjo 2004), to make the project a commercially attractive package. Fortunately, Armfield “went for it like a shot” (Nightingale 2001). Andrew Ross, then Artistic Director of Black Swan, helped negotiate a co-production with Company B Belvoir, the Festivals of Sydney and Perth, and obtained the rights from Winton. This involved winning out over a counter-proposal from the Perth Theatre Company with Paige Gibbs attached as prospective adaptor (Gibbs 2004; Ross 2004). Gibbs, like Monjo, had already adapted one of Winton’s earlier novels for theatre (Lockie Leonard: Human Torpedo), as well as having written the first adaptation of Cloudstreet, in this case an eightpart radio serial which played on ABC Radio National in 1996. Gibbs reports that Winton “agonised” over the decision, but herself concedes that he clearly made the right one in going with the higher-profile combination of Enright and Armfield. The author was keen to maintain a strong Western Australian presence within the production and the rights were granted with a proviso to this effect, but otherwise Winton chose to make no other real contribution to the adaptation process (Monjo 2004; Ross 2004). He later admitted to having never actually read any of the drafts of the script he had been sent, preferring to leave adaptation to the playwrights and concentrate on his own current projects (Butler 1999). Monjo does not recall having ever spoken to Winton until after Cloudstreet premiered.

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Starting the adaptation For the co-adaptors, the fashioning of the play was a formidable task, in no small part due to the weight of expectation in adapting a book which Enright felt had “leapt the fence in Australia, it’s in the bloodstream of the nation”. Staying true to Winton’s novel was high on their list of priorities, as Enright said that “it starts and ends with the book” (Price 1997). Cloudstreet was nothing if not profoundly collaborative. Enright recalled that “I would write a scene, and then Justin would write another one […] We would then show each other what we had written, and then examine each other’s work carefully to see that we were happy with it. If not, it would be rewritten until we thought we had it right” (Banks 1998). Interviews with Monjo echo this sense of equity, a free-flowing creative rapport devoid of ego or hierarchy, with both writers revising each other’s work. Enright said “[t]echnically it’s the most difficult thing I’ve done” (Price 1997), although Monjo’s recollections of the experience were not of quite so arduous a process. Early on they had assistance from Douglas Hedge, whom they hired to compose “an exhaustive synopsis” of the novel (a typed transcript of all the dialogue) – a task that freed the adaptors to work on the material more efficiently (Enright and Monjo: ‘Adaptors’ Notes’ 1999). Monjo describes the process of generating reams of notes with Enright, trying to keep track of the plot on a whiteboard and using index cards to map out Cloudstreet’s sprawling content into dramatic beats that could then be examined individually for worth, relevance and, to a lesser extent, stageability (Price 1997). Enright and Monjo quickly decided that maintaining clarity of plot and fashioning a play of a watchable length were their immediate concerns. In his book, Winton had employed an episodic structure that produced a piecemeal development of the characters while largely concentrating on a richly elaborated evocation of time and place. Concerned that this approach might work poorly for live theatre, Enright and Monjo made the crucial decision early on to give their adaptation a strong structure to bring Cloudstreet’s story centre-stage. The idea they struck upon to facilitate this was to declare the narrative core of the play to be the respective character journeys of Quick Lamb and Rose Pickles, eldest children of the two families at the centre of the novel. This adaptive choice was designed to afford


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the stage adaptation a far more delineated story arc than the novel’s seemingly minimal and comparatively sidelined plot. Focusing on Quick and Rose was also a thematically appropriate decision since their characters embody the separation and ultimate union of the Pickles and Lamb families. Apart from representing the future of their respective families, their marriage prefigures the ultimate coming together of the two clans, which forms a key aspect of the play’s concluding message of community. Structurally, thematically and in terms of Cloudstreet’s pan-generational concerns, Quick and Rose indeed became the “spine” of the play, as it was often described by Enright (Harford 1997; Pollock 1998; Price 1997; Nightingale 2001). This initial phase of adapting novel to stageplay was a somewhat isolated endeavour, yet Enright stated that “Armfield and his creative team were our constant and generous collaborators” (Enright and Monjo: ‘Adaptors’ Notes’ 1999). Armfield’s influence on the process was apparent even at this early stage. Monjo relates how he would check in from time to time, making no requests regarding content but serving as an arbiter whenever there were creative disagreements on the script between the co-adaptors, who would ask in such instances “which way should we go, Neil?” In these cases Armfield would always be the one to “make the call” (Monjo 2004; Gaden 2004). The workshop in the Workshop Apart from Armfield’s visits, the first major external input into the writing process was through a workshop in May 1997 amidst the grime and din of the Wilson Street railway workshops in Newtown, Sydney (Gorman 1999). Over the following fortnight the co-writers intensely considered the script’s form, structure and content with the design crew, Armfield and a group of actors, several of whom would end up in the actual production, such as Gillian Jones, Max Cullen, Dan Wyllie, Kris McQuade and Rebecca Massey. Enright reminisced over his particular enjoyment of this aspect of collaboration: “When a Kris McQuade or Gillian Jones or Judi Farr enters the room, she brings not only talent and skill but judgment and intuition which contribute to the shaping of the whole piece, not just the actor’s role in it” (Enright 2003: 19). Copies of the novel were given to everyone in attendance and it was agreed that as much fealty as possible to Winton’s text was

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preferable. The writers’ whiteboard technique was resurrected with sheets of butchers’ paper on the wall graphing the progress of the story and individual characters. Enright and Monjo presented an extremely long early draft of the script, and the primary task often seemed to be simply a case of determining “what we could leave out” (McQuade 2004; Cullen 2004). Everyone interviewed for this research who was involved in the workshop described it as an especially inclusive process, dominated by open discussion “led by Neil”, a situation informed by Armfield’s usual rehearsal technique of beginning with open discussion and utilising an ethos of “playfulness” (Fewster 2001). Armfield’s guiding hand on the script became more evident from this point onwards. Although Monjo’s account downplays any sense of overt hierarchy, it is apparent from many of his comments that Armfield ultimately made a significant proportion of creative decisions, however collaboratively they may have been discussed. Deciding on the presentational structure of the play was the workshop’s major outcome (Enright and Monjo: ‘Adaptors’ Notes’ 1999; Nightingale 2001). Staging Cloudstreet over two nights, along the lines of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s influential production of Nicholas Nickleby, was given serious thought, yet Armfield ultimately felt there was no middle point in the play which would serve as an adequately emotional conclusion to an individual night of theatre, and thus it was better not to split up the story. So it was decided that, in order to best maintain Cloudstreet’s dramatic arc, the play would be a single, colossal show of three acts (McQuade 2004). Monjo later made the point that the play is actually only fifteen minutes longer than an uncut production of Hamlet. “Nick and I knew from day one that we thought the power of the story had to be told in a number of hours or else we knew we would lose something. It would become like one of those adaptations where it doesn’t really have the power of the novel” (Pollock 1998: 5). Rehearsals and rewrites Having decided to stage the show in three acts, finding the precise narrative points for the act breaks was difficult to decide, amongst sundry other details. Enright and Monjo continued to revise the script over the frantic eight-week period of final rehearsals (Norman 1999), which was almost inadequate to the immense task of realising


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Winton’s novel on stage. They attended the first few weeks of these rehearsals (and sporadically throughout) as they continued rewriting, forever refining their playscript amidst a barrage of suggestions, with dog-eared copies of the novel being brandished at them. Actors interviewed from the original cast had great praise for how accommodating Enright and Monjo were throughout the process of adaptation, and Claire Jones recalled that they only really resisted new additions if they felt such material was not facilitating the story. As in the workshop, Armfield exerted a strong influence on the shape of the developing piece, arbitrating creative disagreements and promoting a sense of democracy in the process. He had considerable sway over what material was included and excluded from the script. As Monjo put it: “everything would be a Neil decision in the end”. While these further alterations on the script “had the appearance of being very democratic”, and were to a certain extent, Armfield ultimately served as arbiter, and had “a big input” himself (Gaden 2004). By comparison, however, Monjo stresses that there was never any attempt on his and Enright’s part to delineate how any part of the script should be staged, trusting that Armfield and his actors would work it all out. As a result, the script is replete with “impossible” stage directions – such as, “Quick is knocked over by a wounded roo” (Enright and Monjo 1999: 51), or “The boat flies through the sky” (Ibid: 32) – without any accompanying indications of how to achieve such effects, nor does the later, published playscript contain any reference to how such moments were realised in the final production, leaving the text open for future interpreters. Another example of Enright and Monjo’s unprescriptive approach is that no version of their script ever dictated the doubling to be used in the production, as all such decisions were left for Armfield. Indeed, each character is listed as a separate role, as it would be for a screenplay, with thirtyeight speaking parts. The script was still in a relatively fluid state for these initial weeks of final rehearsal; characters vanished and reappeared, scenes did much the same, and the doubling was frequently reassigned. After a while the script simply had to be finalised to some extent, so that the performers could lock in sequences and lines could be learnt, but the process was more than a little strained towards the end of this period when it became evident that rehearsal time was running out and that

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this huge play would have to debut somewhat under-rehearsed. Even large stagecraft considerations were still up in the air in these final weeks, such as the entire staging of the ending and the revelation that the ghosts haunting the house could be realised by shadowplay rather than physical representation. When the play was three weeks from opening, a playable version of the script was effectively finalised, and for the rest of 1998’s Sydney–Perth season no real changes were made to either dialogue or blocking. Opening night: turkey or triumph? Staged in a purpose-converted container shed at Berth 9, Darling Harbour, Cloudstreet’s opening night has a certain mythic quality – everything went wrong yet it was received as an unqualified triumph. The excellence of the work shone through, but its instant popularity seems in no small part due to audiences being so favourably predisposed towards it. Most of those involved, including Armfield, were uncertain about how the play would be received, a feeling exacerbated by the chaos leading up to and especially including opening night itself. Despite a longer-than-average rehearsal period of eight weeks, the production was so under-rehearsed that opening night itself was the first time a fully scored, teched run of the play had been attempted, leaving the actors frantically consulting prop, costume and running lists with scant practice. Incredibly, the final twenty minutes had not yet been properly blocked, and as a result the cast had to wing the last several scenes on opening night. The crucial moment of the play’s moving conclusion – in which the doors at the end of the stage open and Daniel Wyllie as Fish Lamb leaps into Darling Harbour – had not even been tested, and he was thus required to attempt it for the first time in the first performance. Production week leading up to the opening had been beset by near-disasters such as lighting designer Mark Howett breaking his arm after falling twenty feet onto the concrete floor, forcing him essentially to improvise lighting cues on opening night. Further headaches were caused by the presence of a container ship directly blocking the view of the harbour for Fish’s exit and spoiling the play’s coup de théâtre, as well as the ship’s extremely loud generator creating a constant grating dirge throughout the rehearsals.


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The ship was finally moved after much consternation, merely an hour before the premiere. On top of it all, the Sydney summer heat was so intense that the concrete-floored, tin-roofed venue became an oven that made any kind of activity extremely arduous, much less thirteenhour days of time-stressed rehearsals conducted amidst the constant din of the generator. Even though the cast had great faith in the material, the usual difficulties of any production week, once applied to Cloudstreet, proved to be extreme. Many involved became convinced that the production would be a complete “turkey”, as the physical hardships of rehearsal and the frustrations over Armfield’s customarily disordered technical rehearsals were intensified by such a huge, complex play (Horsburgh 1999; Pitman 2004; Gaden 2004). Most widely reported, though, was the near disaster of opening night itself. The initial Sydney run was staged at Berth 9, a temporarily purpose-converted container shed with bad acoustics, uncomfortable seating and no air conditioning, which had noise difficulties whenever it rained on its metal roof. The night the play opened, it was teeming. This deluge generated such a racket that many reported the first act to be entirely inaudible beyond the eighth row (Stevenson 1998; Waites 1998; Banks 1998; Gorman 1999; Jones 2004; Hallett 2001; Horsburgh 1999; Keenan 2001). In a state of panic, Monjo went on a superstitious quest to lure the “Shifty Shadow” (as Sam Pickles would put it) of bad luck away from the beleaguered production. Going backstage, he asked Max Cullen (who played Sam) for a random number. Cullen said “twentythree”, and Monjo took a taxi to nearby Star City casino and proceeded to lose thirty successive bets of ten dollars on the number twenty-three at roulette. Whether it was mere coincidence or indeed a moment of Wintonian serendipity, the show actually did pick up in the second act, with the rain easing off to audible levels, allowing the performance to “click” (Monjo 2004; McQuade 2004; Nightingale 2001). By the end of Act Three there was no doubt that Cloudstreet had worked, and worked spectacularly. The standing ovation it received was not merely to congratulate the ensemble’s fortitude in the face of the deluge. This was an audience that was elated by this awesome and essentially unprecedented work of Australian theatre.

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Final rewrites Enright and Monjo’s contribution certainly did not end with the initial season. Although Cloudstreet was a roaring success, there were still many lingering issues with the hurriedly completed script and it was decided that a final revision was in order before the production’s inevitable revival. These rewrites for the domestic and international tour in 1999 were at Armfield’s request, and Enright and Monjo made these additional refinements without any further workshopping or rehearsal input. Although the actors and the writers themselves had some small contribution to this, generally speaking (as Monjo explained) “we didn’t go change things unless Neil wanted them to be changed”. Surprisingly, these revisions included making the already epic play longer by some forty minutes, with the most significant modification being an increase in Rose’s share of the ensemble’s narration, to equate her role more clearly with that of Quick and further consolidate them as the play’s narrative “spine”. This new 1999 draft of Enright and Monjo’s script was published in the same year by Currency Press, and it was used for the final 2001 tour without any further rewriting. Textual comparisons Close comparison of the scripts (including Claire Jones’ copies of the “final” 1998 rehearsal version and the Revised Rehearsal Draft, May 1999) to the novel demonstrates some intriguing aspects of how the adaptation created a text both highly faithful to Winton yet also a clearly distinct new version of Cloudstreet. Some aspects are pervasive and affect the overall nature of the story, such as the play’s comparatively greater focus on a progressing plot. The novel’s meandering storytelling imparts a deep sense of tone and place, but such a style lacks the dramatic action the adaptors sought for the stage. However, Andrew Ross felt that the process of streamlining the novel resulted in a gratuitous excision of many specific Perth references, believing that the adaptors mistakenly assumed that strong local content was unnecessary given Cloudstreet’s “universal” appeal. Ross argued that no one expects local references to the London of Dickens or the St Petersburg of Tolstoy to be eliminated simply because they are “unnecessary”, and that a richness of local flavour in


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no way detracts from a work’s accessibility. A similar sentiment was independently expressed by Western Australian critic Mark Naglazas, who felt that “[A]s a viewer from WA, I felt a little short-changed. What makes Cloudstreet so important for [Perth residents] […] is that Winton has not simply mentioned a few well-known names but woven the very texture of the city into his novel […] In this sense Cloudstreet is our Ulysses, a book in which the city […] is perhaps the most important character” (Naglazas 1998). Apart from the dominance of the Quick and Rose thread, other significant story points that remain prominent in the play include Oriel Lamb’s struggles with the house and with God, Lester Lamb and Sam Pickles’ respective journeys as inadequate fathers and their eventual friendship, Rose’s reconciliation with her mother Dolly, Quick’s with Oriel, and the families’ with the house. Fish’s relationship with Oriel, Quick, “the water” and the house’s ghosts might not exactly constitute a traditional character journey, but he remains a central figure and the play largely retains the novel’s content relating to him. Naturally, there were some features of the original story that were entirely absent from the play. Undoubtedly the most painful exclusion of all for fans of the novel was that of the Pentecostal Pig. John Gaden and Justin Monjo both related how they and many of the cast were also sorry to lose this touch of magic realism from the novel; a talking pig understood only by the brain-damaged Fish Lamb was one of the book’s definitive images, rivalled only by the flying boat that was retained as the major visual of the stage version. Gaden feels that although it was a shame to lose the pig, Armfield’s decision was the right one since it may have pushed the magic realism of the play too far. Given that it would not likely have been staged with an actual pig but rather an abstraction of one, this, combined with the fact that it was a talking pig, might have been too much to swallow for an audience viewing an often semi-naturalistic play. As Enright and Monjo have both stated, Winton’s prose is frequently so similar to dialogue that adapting it was at times simply a matter of cut and paste. To give the adaptors credit, the task was more complex than this, as Winton’s writing style is unconventional, and Cloudstreet eschews the inverted comma wholeheartedly. Instead, his text meanders – at times crudely speech-like, at others lyrical. As Paige Gibbs put it, one of the challenges in adapting Cloudstreet is that it has no traditional dialogue, or at least does not demark it

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through conventional means. Between this unorthodox use of punctuation and a style of highly fluid narration that frequently touches on the interiority of different characters’ experiences without exactly fulfilling traditional omniscient narration, it is not always clear precisely what is dialogue. As a result, although there is considerable virtually word-for-word transcription of Winton’s writing in the playscript, in many instances Enright and Monjo had to adjust scenes to accommodate the greater naturalism and exteriority of continuous stage dialogue. Most episodes had to be adjusted to make them viable for staging, and in many points the play presents scenes which are either conflations of others in the novel, or are inferences and dramatisations of events originally only referred to or depicted without the benefit of dialogue. More internal sections such as those charting Quick’s emotional journey had to be rewritten as monologues. For all these various kinds of scenes, Enright and Monjo faced the challenge of approximating the Wintonian idiom in essentially invented dialogue, at times drawing on Max Cullen’s lifetime store of the Australian vernacular (Cullen 2004). The adaptation’s most outright departure from the book was the switching of the function of narrator from Fish to Cloudstreet’s mysterious Aboriginal figure. This is a complex matter, as the use and attribution of narration in either novel or play is hardly straightforward to begin with. Winton avoids using an omniscient narrator, or at least any traditional third person narration. While the novel wanders in and out of the consciousnesses and objective realities of its characters, it does at times suggest an external narrator of sorts. In the final passage of the book, Winton reveals this narrator to be Fish Lamb, or rather the damaged boy’s soul. Although the metaphysics of the book are far from clear, the notion is that at the moment of his first drowning and near death at the beginning of Cloudstreet, Fish’s soul (or part of it) becomes separated from his body (Winton, The Edge of the World c. 1997; The Tim Winton Interviews c. 1994). When Fish drowns again at the end of the novel and fully dies, he is reunited with this lost part of himself, the part unhampered by the mental damage that has crippled him, and in this moment of reunion Fish understands the whole story of Cloudstreet. With the cryptic opening passage of the novel now clear, one realises that the


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entire tale of the novel has been told in the instant of Fish’s death and his regaining of wholeness. Enright and Monjo’s adaptation presents a quite different, far more performative mode in which the notion of Fish’s soul observing the action was dispensed with almost entirely, save for his speech which constitutes the final lines of the play. Instead the occasional moments of third person narration peppered throughout the play are shared by the ensemble. Neither wholly in nor out of character, the actors deliver narration via short interjections in the form of direct addresses to the audience in a manner that proved no disruption for the production’s neo-Brechtian staging. These moments of narration tend to be short, delivered by pertinent characters and function either as linking devices between scenes or, more commonly, as a method of quickly imparting information too cumbersome or psychologically internal to stage – for example, Quick’s monologue in Scene 16 about his sadness in reading about tragedies in the newspapers (Enright and Monjo 1999: 19). However, when an embodied narrator is called for, it is no longer Fish’s omniscient spirit who guides us through the story. Instead, the play employs a figure they have named “Black Man” in the script, a mysterious and supernatural Aboriginal man who is derived from Winton’s text, but who has undergone a significant redefinition. The character is elusive and ill-defined in the original novel where several characters from both families have strange, even mystical encounters with Aboriginal men. Winton’s novel does not indicate clearly that these figures are necessarily the same person or entity, but the text is open to this interpretation. Although the play includes much doubling, it is fairly clear that the adaptation views him as an individual character. This enigmatic Aboriginal presence in the book can be seen at most as some form of spiritual observer, whereas the decision to imbue Black Man with the new role of narrator greatly empowers this symbolic character and, by extension, the Aboriginal voice in general. This is something that was scarcely evident in the novel. Armfield promoted the view that the central Cloudstreet house is a metaphor for Australia itself and that the Lambs and Pickles represent its European colonisers (Armfield 1998; Harford 1997; Nightingale 2001; Rees 1997; Burvill 2000: 160). For some, the play’s increased prominence of Aboriginal representation was a positive, pro-Reconciliation gesture on the part of its

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adaptors. This was an issue often discussed in rehearsals and was certainly the view publicly put forward by Neil Armfield at the time (Jones 2004; Armfield 1998; Harford 1997; Nightingale 2001). For others, the racial politics of the novel were questionable and the heightened significance of the Aboriginal content vastly exacerbated problems which lay dormant in Winton’s original version. Tom Burvill particularly noted that “the liberal credentials of Armfield and the Company which produced [Cloudstreet are] […] part of the antiracist multiculturalist liberal left”, a fact he felt was at odds with the politics apparently expressed by the play itself (Burvill 2000: 158). Andrew Ross also thought that the Company B adaptation had unintentionally aggravated problematic but relatively dormant racial issues in the novel through a well-intentioned but ultimately somewhat misguided impulse of “fashionable leftist” pro-Aboriginalism. By any measure, on stage Cloudstreet became a work very much concerned with a vision of the Australian nation, and in doing so its creators chose to bring its Aboriginal issues to the fore, whether problematic or otherwise (for further discussion, see also Burvill 2000; Nimmo 2004; Teiwes 2006). The legacy When Cloudstreet finally closed its third tour in Washington, DC, in 2001, a decision had been reached not to revive the production in the foreseeable future. Five years after he first began working on the stageplay, Nick Enright told the media that he felt “that’s it” for Cloudstreet. “We doubt very much we could get this group of people together again for a fourth time”, he said. “I think to keep replacing people would undermine the fundamental energy of the piece. It’d be nice to do it again, but my instinct is that it’s over” (Roberts 2001). Indeed, almost a decade later we have not seen Cloudstreet again. Although described by some as the most significant Australian play since Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in providing its audiences with a “similar epiphany” of cultural recognition (Bennie 1998), it is a play that remains inexorably linked in people’s minds to its original production. Of course, this is hardly surprising, since the adaptation was originally developed so closely with those who first staged it. Yet, here we have a published playscript, a distinct entity from both Winton’s novel and, potentially, even from Company B’s indelible production.


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Clearly, the play’s potential future has obstacles that would not beset many of Enright’s other works. New productions would face the financial and logistical difficulties of a five-hour play with a large cast that was originally created with the backing of two festivals and two theatre companies – difficult things to reconcile with any kind of regular company programming. Like The Doll, might it have a rich legacy amongst educational and community theatres, where the costs of fourteen actors would not be a problem, or would its epic length be an issue for such audiences as well? What challenges might future directors face in approaching with fresh eyes a text developed so closely with the artistic vision of Neil Armfield? One can only hope that this special work will indeed live on to many subsequent incarnations, as an enduring classic of the Australian stage. Much like the play’s own theme of community, it was the spirit of collaboration which made the adaptation of Cloudstreet a reality. The play’s phenomenal success stands not only as a testament to Nick Enright’s talents as a playwright, but as an inspired collaborator.

Note 1

This chapter draws upon my BA Honours thesis, ‘Cloudstreet: The History of and Ideological Shifts in the Stage Adaptation’, School of Theatre Film and Dance, University of New South Wales, 2004. Research included conducting interviews with Justin Monjo, Andrew Ross, Paige Gibbs, and a number of actors in the original production: Max Cullen, John Gaden, Claire Jones, Kris McQuade, and Chris Pitman. Neil Armfield was not available due to serious illness, and Nick Enright had died the previous year.

Works cited Aldred, Debra. 2001. ‘Cloudstreet’s Tour de Force Lights Up the Town’ in The Courier-Mail (21 July 2001): 11. Armfield, Neil. 1998. ‘Director’s Note’ in Cloudstreet production programmes, Company B Archives. Banks, Ron. 1998. ‘Up Your Street’ in The West Australian (14 February 1998): 21. Bennie, Angela. 1998. ‘Street of Universal Dreams?’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (9 February 1998): 15. Burvill, Tom. 2000. ‘Nostalgia and the Global City: Recuperating the Battler in the Sydney Production of Cloudstreet’ in de Groen, Fran and Ken Stewart (eds) Australian Writing and the City. Proceedings of the 1999 ASAL conference. Sydney: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2000: 157–163. Butler, Robert. 1999. ‘What Cate Did First’ in Independent on Sunday (12 September 1999): 8.

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Cochrane, Peter. 1999. ‘Stage Teams Take Out the Top Writers’ Awards’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (26 July 1999): 15. Cullen, Max. 2004. Interview with the author, 30 August 2004. Enright, Nicholas. 2002/2003. ‘Collaboration and Community’. The Seventh Rex Cramphorn Lecture, Belvoir Street Theatre, 24 November 2002 in Australasian Drama Studies 42 (April 2003): 14–25. Enright, Nicholas and Justin Monjo. 1998. ‘Adaptor’s [sic] Note’ in Cloudstreet production programmes, Company B Archives. —— 1999. ‘Adaptors’ Notes’, Cloudstreet, adapted from the novel by Tim Winton. Sydney: Currency Press in association with Company B Belvoir and Black Swan Theatre, 1999: n.p. Fewster, Russell David. 2001. ‘A Rehearsal Analysis of the Production of The Blind Giant is Dancing by Neil Armfield and the Company B Ensemble’. Master of Philosophy Thesis, Centre for Performance Studies, University of Sydney, August 2001. Gaden, John. 2004. Interview with the author, 23 September 2004. Gibbs, Paige. 2004. Interview with the author, 28 July 2004. Gorman, Gareth. 1999. ‘Max Cullen: Every Cloud Street Has a Silver Lining’ in L:A:M (London), 7 September 1999: n.p. Hallett, Bryce. 2000. ‘Never Rains but Pours’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (16 February 2000): 14. —— 2001. ‘Performance’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (11 June 2001): 19. Harford, Sonia. 1997. ‘On the Street Where We Live’ in The Age (13 December 1997): 5. Horsburgh, Susan. 1999. ‘Up in the Clouds’ in Time Magazine (London) (27 September 1999): 90–91. Jones, Claire. 2004. Interview with the author, 24 and 27 August 2004. Keenan, Catherine. 2001. ‘Cloud Surfing’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (8 June 2001): 3. McQuade, Kris. 2004. Interview with the author, 10 August 2004. Monjo, Justin. 2004. Interview with the author, 30 August and 6 September 2004. Naglazas, Mark. 1998. ‘Historic Theatre’ in The West Australian, Today (12 January 1998): 5. Nightingale, Benedict. 2001. ‘Uncovering the Humanity in Rootlessness and Race’ in The New York Times (30 September 2001): 3. Nimmo, Heather. 2004. ‘The World is Holy? Maybe So’ in Contemporary Theatre Review (August 2004): 12–20. Norman, Fiona Scott. 1999. ‘Cloudstreet with Silver Lining’ in The Age, Entertainment Guide (2 July 1999): 12. Pitman, Christopher. 2004. Interview with the author, 10 August 2004. Pollock, Katie. 1998. ‘Lambs to the Laughter’ in The Sydney Morning Herald, Metro (2 January 1998): 4–5. Price, Matt. 1997. ‘Triple Booked’ in The Australian Magazine (13–14 December 1997): 38. Rees, Jasper. 1997. ‘New Cultural High from Down Under’ in Evening Standard (London) (14 September 1999): 26. Roberts, Jo. 2001. ‘Vale Cloudstreet’ in The Age, Today (30 October 2001): 5. Ross, Andrew. 2004. Interview with the author, 16 and 17 August 2004.


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Stevenson, Andrew. 1998. ‘Cloudstreet Beats the Rain’ in The Daily Telegraph (5 January 1998): 6. Teiwes, Jack. 2004. ‘Cloudstreet: The History of and Ideological Shifts in the Stage Adaptation’. BA Honours thesis, School of Theatre Film and Dance, University of New South Wales. —— 2006. ‘Nostalgia, Reconciliation or New National Myth?: The Adaptation of Cloudstreet to the Stage’ in Australasian Drama Studies 48 (April 2006): 228–247. Usher, Robin. 1998. ‘Winton’s Vision Reaches the Sky’ in The Age (6 January 1998): C7. Waites, James. 1998. ‘Triumph over the Elements’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (5 January 1998): 24. Winton, Tim. 1991. Cloudstreet. South Yarra, Vic: McPhee Gribble, 1991. —— c. 1994. The Tim Winton Interviews video cassette. Melbourne: Video Classroom, c. 1994. —— c. 1997. The Edge of the World video recording narrated by Hugo Weaving. Lindfield, NSW: Film Australia, c. 1997. Wolf, Matt. 1999. ‘An Australian Theatre Epic Goes Global’ in Weekend Entertainment and Arts: London Theatre (14–17 October 1999). Wright, Michael. 1998. ‘Home and Away’ in The Sunday Times (12 September 1998): 8–9.

Chapter 5 Youthful Presence: Nick Enright as Teacher and A Property of the Clan Mary Ann Hunter Abstract Throughout his writing career, Nick Enright was an esteemed teacher and mentor for many Australian theatre artists. He also wrote and directed theatre for young people in his early days, although his best known work in this area is Blackrock, produced as a mainstage play and feature film in the 1990s. In considering Nick Enright’s contribution to Australian theatre, this chapter recounts some of his teaching legacies, which are sometimes overshadowed by his other successes, before discussing his Theatre-in-Education precursor to Blackrock, A Property of the Clan. Commissioned by Freewheels Theatre-in-Education in response to the rape and murder of fourteenyear-old Leigh Leigh in Newcastle in 1989, A Property of the Clan was a watershed in Australian theatre for young people and exemplifies Enright’s insightful understanding of the diversity of youth experience.

When considering Nick Enright’s outstanding contribution to Australian performance, his esteemed role as a mentor and writer for young people is sometimes overshadowed by his mainstage and film successes. Enright taught at a number of the nation’s major theatre training institutions and he was an active and committed mentor to scores of young artists. Early in his career, he devised Theatre-inEducation and other works for young audiences, ranging from the enchanting verse drama, Carnival of the Animals, to the compelling tragedy of A Property of the Clan. Infused through this body of teaching and writing work is Enright’s empathy and respect for the diverse world-views and experiences of young people. His scripts delight and challenge through insightful language play; and, by creating performative moments of presence and possibility, Enright’s work continues to invite young people both to playfully imagine and critically survey the worlds they encounter. This chapter recounts some of Enright’s legacies in his teaching and youth-specific work

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before turning in detail to A Property of the Clan: a play which captures, through an astute focus on language, the grief and confusion of an ‘every-community’ of young people encountering the violent killing of one of their own. Nick Enright taught at a range of institutions, including New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where he taught acting to dance students while he was studying playwriting in 1976–1977. On his return to Australia, Enright worked at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) where he maintained a close and long-term association with staff and students. He was Head of Acting at NIDA between 1982 and 1984 and returned often to teach until a short time before his death. He also taught at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) where he was Adjunct Professor in the School of Dramatic Arts from 1998 to 2000 and returned frequently to teach and collaborate with the graduating artists. Enright was also an occasional teacher at the Actors Centre, Sydney, and a collaborator with the young artists of the Australian Young People’s Theatre, and other ensembles including State of Play. David King, Head of Music Theatre at WAAPA, describes Enright as a “teacher of genius” who “loved working with young people in a classroom and teaching the elements of acting and textwork in song” (King in Weber 2003). His passion and engagement in teaching were clearly recognised by his students, with some expressing their appreciation through elegiac works such as comedian and former WAAPA student, Eddie Perfect’s ‘Someone Like That’: “Someone like that holds a pen, or he enters a classroom, or theatre and nothing’s the same” (Perfect in Dodds 2005). Another former student, Michael Tuahine from NIDA, encapsulates Enright’s approach to teaching for the stage when he comments that: “Nick Enright taught us always to be available for that person standing opposite you onstage. Open your heart and your arms to them. Have fun and let go – constantly” (Tuahine 2005). This encapsulates Enright’s commitment to artistic collaboration generally, and one needs only to read his significant 2002 Rex Cramphorn lecture to comprehend the creative inspiration he gained from working with others – students and professional colleagues alike. In that address at Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre, Enright borrows Cramphorn’s phrase “the grace of creativity” (Enright 2003: 15) to explain the ways in which “I want to be a collaborator, working as part of a community”

Youthful Presence: A Teacher and A Property of the Clan

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whereby “collaboration starts in humility, tranquility and mutual respect” (21, 25). This is an approach that also resonates in his scripts. Enright’s skill in evoking place and crafting situations, language and characters from a range of diverse communities and circumstances evolves from a similar openness to moments of presence and possibility, unraveling for his audience striking insights into lives far removed from his own. Enright joined Magpie Theatre-in-Education, the youth arm of the South Australian Theatre Company (SATC) in 1978. He initially served as a writer and director for the company, developing groupdevised and community-based works that toured the state. Enright created several new works with the team, including Strike at the Port, a work for upper high school students about unions and the 1928 Port Adelaide wharf strike, and Me ’n’ Me Mate, a show about mateship in Australia. In the ensuing years, he was to work on the SATC mainstage with his translations of Don Juan and Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters (with Ron Blair), although he maintained an interest in work for young people. During this period, Enright created The Maitland and Morpeth String Quartet, a series of bedtime stories written for the children of his friends, John Bell and Anna Volska. A manuscript found its way to the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) where it was produced as an award-winning radio feature and, within a few years, it was published as a children’s book and an animated television feature based on designs by Victoria Roberts. Thereafter, the Hunter Valley Theatre Company staged a performance of The Maitland and Morpeth String Quartet in the region of its title and, in 2003, the script was revived in a tribute to Enright at the Brisbane Writers Festival. An indication of the delight Enright took in writing for young children can be found in the following ‘Royal March of the Lion’, a verse from a libretto he was commissioned to write for Sydney Symphony Orchestra to accompany their performance of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. If I was a lion instead of me, I could jump over rocks, I could sleep in a tree. If I was a lion or a lioness, I could always leave my den in a mess,

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Nick Enright: An Actor’s Playwright Swim in the river, hunt for my food, Run around all day in the nude […] (Enright 1990: 5)

As with The Maitland and Morpeth String Quartet, Enright’s Carnival of the Animals project took on a vibrant and extended life of its own, and was broadcast and later reproduced in a children’s book illustrated by Peter Townsend. After leaving Magpie, and once other aspects of his mainstage career developed, Enright continued to enjoy opportunities to write for children. He particularly enjoyed crafting poems and ditties for the many godchildren he had among his extended arts family (Clarke 2005). Nick Enright’s plays are renowned for their strong evocation of place – the Maitland of the floods, the iconic country town, the working-class city, the Australian beach, or generic Catholic school. There is also a strong interplay of memory and childhood in his works and a common concern about “the fate of young people” (Kelly 1994: 63). In an interview with Veronica Kelly, Enright explained this as an interest in: [f]amily, I think […] and particularly the fate of the young. My feeling is that we are pretty much prisoners – prisoners may be too strong a word – but creatures of our own preoccupations and obsessions; they were implanted long before we were aware we were going to be an adult […] Patrick White said nothing much happens after the age of six or seven that is really of any significance in the making of an artist. (Ibid)

Reading transcripts of interviews with Enright over his career, it is interesting to note how often he referred to ‘exercising’ himself as an artist: always looking for ways to create a challenge in his role as a writer. This extended to his writing for children and young people, as he related to Kelly: I suppose what I enjoy about the craft of writing is that sort of mimesis: the entering into experiences of people that I can’t experience first-hand. I’m much more challenged and exercised by those kids in A Property of the Clan because of the leap that it required me to make. (1994: 66)

In 1991, Enright was persuaded to return to writing professionally for a youth audience by Brian Joyce, artistic director of Freewheels


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Theatre-in-Education in Newcastle. The 1989 death of fourteen-yearold Leigh Leigh at a local beach party had deeply divided the Newcastle community and Joyce had suggested Enright consider it as an idea for a play. Enright related his response in his interview with Kelly: [I said to Brian Joyce] I couldn’t take it on, it horrifies me too much […] The difficulty of what I call movie-of-the-week writing is that it’s victims and villains, and to get any sort of dialectic going is very hard, because what kind of response can you have to rape and murder but the conventional one? And he [Joyce] said this fantastic thing: you don’t understand what’s happened in this community as a result of that event; there’s a whole group of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old kids who cannot speak to each other, or to any adult, about the issues that it raised for them. They have been so damaged by being participants in this experience, or witnesses, or through having a sister or brother who was in the class or at the party or whatever. And it’s become a taboo subject. It was that one thing that he said that exercised me. (Ibid)

Enright went straight from completing the script of Lorenzo’s Oil with George Miller to participating in multiple interviews in Newcastle with Carol Myers, a woman who was studying community theatre at the University of Newcastle and whose children went to the same school as Leigh Leigh. Enright saw a play not in the narrative of the crime itself, but in the responses of the young people and their families who were affected by the event. After meeting a number of young people through Myers’ connections, Enright wrote what was ostensibly a fictional play although he returned to Newcastle to conduct readings of the draft script and invite community response. The resulting play, A Property of the Clan, is short and razor sharp in its use of language. It is structured mostly as a series of duologues during the anticipatory lead-up and aftershock of an unsupervised party to celebrate nineteen-year-old Ricko’s return to the fictional Blackrock. We learn that Tracy, a fourteen-year-old character we never meet, attends the party and is raped repeatedly in a nearby sand-dune before being killed with a rock wound to the head. Initially, the young male characters in the play cannot speak of the tragedy – either because of the social code which compels them to refrain from dobbing on mates, or simply because they cannot find the words. For the most part, Jared, a sixteen-year-old friend of Ricko’s, actively avoids talking about the event despite the urging of his mother, Diane,

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and girlfriend, Rachel. Unable to deal with the torment of having been a silent witness to Tracy’s rape, Jared tries to deny the event’s effect on their lives: “And I don’t want to hear one more fucken word about Tracy Warner […] I want things to be the way they were” (24). He finally shares his story with Ricko and later tells Rachel after learning of Ricko’s guilt as Tracy’s killer. But his confession to Rachel is far more antagonistic and concludes with a glimpse of his own capacity for violence: JARED: […] And she’s gone, and he’s gone. Fuck. Fuck. Wham! [He smashes the mug. Silence. She picks up the shards.] Well, there’s Jared all in pieces […] Say something. Say something bitchy. Get back at me. You’re never short of words. Say something. Fight back! RACHEL: Let me go. Let me go or I’ll […] Let me go! You bloody animal! You’ve cut my hand. (51).

The young women in the play are more articulate in their response to Tracy’s death. They initiate rituals of remembrance and Rachel, in particular, voices her frustration and anger at the inability of the boys to acknowledge and deal with the tragedy. In a class soon after the murder, she makes a presentation on the topic of prejudice and discrimination: RACHEL: […] I want to talk about women. Women and men. The last two weeks, there’s been one topic of conversation round this school. Tracy Warner. And why she died. As though there was a why. Like there was a logic to it … why was she killed? TEACHER: Rachel, that’s a big question, but it isn’t one we can deal with here. RACHEL: It’s not being dealt with anywhere else. TEACHER: That’s not quite fair. There’s been a counselling program set up. RACHEL: For the girls. Some of the girls. Have any of the boys talked to anyone? […] This is about prejudice and discrimination. TEACHER: It’s more of a personal development issue. Not a topic for history class. RACHEL: This is history. Our history. (19–20)

The theme of young people creating their own history within the broader context of society’s predilection for prejudice and


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discrimination is evident throughout the play: from the history class scenes where students speak of the treatment of Aboriginal women and Jews; and further throughout the text as they adopt labels for each other and their experience. For the young men in particular, naming and labelling become ways to order the power relations in their worlds, make sense of their experience, and, in this case, apportion blame. Even before the party, Jared exclaims, “Scott Abbot’s a bloody little root-rat […] And she [Tracy]’s a moll” (5); while during the party Ricko laughs at the antics of his mates pissing into beer cans with “Shit, we know some animals. Fucken animals, mate” (15). Girls are variously referred to as “bush-pigs” (37), “spunk-buckets” (37) and, in the case of Rachel, a “real snotty stuck-up bitch” (38). Jade, Jared’s younger sister who idolised Tracy and is teased for conversing with Tracy’s spirit at her graveside, laments all the names she is called by others at school: “One girl even said was I a Lezzo” (53). Glenn, the unassuming student who writes for the school paper with Rachel, is similarly marginalised through labelling – “They reckon he’s a sussdog. A poofter […] a queer dog” (22). In a challenge to Jared that goes beyond merely responding to Glenn’s treatment to criticise the boys’ use of language generally, Rachel says, “Say it properly. What you mean. Not a label. He [Glenn] gets all the labels. He’s a flanno. He’s a four-eyes. He’s a spock. Now he’s a queer dog. Say what you really mean” (22). For his part, Glenn goes some way to empowering himself in the face of this marginalisation by collecting the labels put upon him: “I keep a list. Twenty-three names over the last year. I suppose I’ll collect a few more by the end of the summer” (33). Conversely, Jared is incensed at the ways in which labels are used against him and, by implication, the working class of which he is a part: “The way they try to show us on TV, all across Australia. The animals across the water. Living under the smoke-stacks. Those Blackos, the hoons from Black Rock Point” (24) and later, “Even at school, you can feel it. Look at them, the Blackos, the yobs with two heads from across the river. I’m bloody sick of it” (28). Names are used to curse and label, but also to haunt and reveal. As Jared finally speaks his experience, he is appalled at the names that he heard used in violence against Tracy. But in his retelling he also names names to Ricko, thereby threatening one of the key codes of mateship that binds the young men together:

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Nick Enright: An Actor’s Playwright JARED: […] Scott Abbott … RICKO: Keep your voice down, mate. JARED: … Davo and Wayne Hanley. Watching. Barracking. Cheering him on. The names they were calling her … RICKO: They’re your mates. Forget about it. JARED: I’m not a dobber. But I had to tell someone. RICKO: Why the fuck did you tell me names! (29–30)

The desire to name and control becomes potent toward the end of the play, particularly as Ricko makes his court statement confessing to Tracy’s murder. Claiming Tracy was a “real little cock-teasing whore” (45) and expressing disbelief at the doctor’s report that she was a virgin before the attack, Ricko says, “There’s gotta be something wrong somewhere […] People have to act the way they are” (46); or, in his view, the way they are named. The contradictory force and inadequacy of language is strongly felt in the play: language is used to discriminate and oppress at the same time as it fails to make sense of tragedy. With varying efficacy, the characters in A Property of the Clan try to use language to deal with the situation through naming (Jared and Ricko), questioning (Rachel), collecting (Glenn), conjuring the language of Tracy herself (Jade), and through the act of not speaking at all. For the Newcastle community, A Property of the Clan did more than offer different perspectives on a traumatic event in their region. Although fictional, the play provided young people and others with both the impetus and the means to speak some three years after Leigh Leigh’s death. Indeed, legal scholars, Jonathan Morrow and Mehera San Roque, have gone so far as to suggest that A Property of the Clan embodies a speedy and direct response to the crisis precipitated by Leigh Leigh’s rape and murder. The play contemplates an audience which has been directly or indirectly affected by Leigh Leigh’s death; indeed, so focused and specific is Enright’s play in its aims that it constitutes, in a very real sense, a commission of inquiry in itself, a forensic re-examination of the causes and results of the murder. It is a play to get people talking. (Morrow and San Roque 1996: 485–486)

Notably, in view of Morrow and San Roque’s claim, the play was not performed at Leigh Leigh’s school as the administration perceived it to be too early to “open a wound” (Joyce in Hall 1995: 38). Enright said of A Property of the Clan and its later adaptation of Blackrock: “Fundamentally it is not a play about rape, sex and


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violence. It is a play about community, community fracture, family fracture; about young people and the soul of a young person being divided” (Hollingworth: 1997). It is clearly not a play about Tracy but, in the tradition of Greek tragedy, it is about society facing itself: its prejudices, uses and abuses of language, and its conflicts and anxieties around gender. Enright expressed clear views about the examination of masculinity in the play and the precariousness of adolescence: I believe for young men in this culture, there exists a moment of possibility. A window of opportunity that happens between puberty and the end of formal education where some positive influence – whether parent, lover, partner, teacher, guide, mentor – is pivotal for a young man dealing with his true position in the world and his own responsibilities: for his sexuality, his own strength, his own maleness. That moment can be experienced or not. And if not dealt with, the likelihood of that young man being a good father, lover, or partner are limited. Women face similar challenges but, I believe, these points are more recurrent. Very few men get beyond that crucial stage when they are dealing with their own erotic energy and therefore dealing with the world. (Hollingworth 1997)

A Property of the Clan is an important Australian play because it represents and values young people and their experience with integrity. It is careful not to homogenise youth experience, even though during Freewheels’ first tour of the play directed by Brian Joyce, young people responded as if it had been written about events in their own region (see Joyce in Morrow and San Roque 1996: 500). This seeming universal relevance lies both in the troubling ordinariness and frequency of attacks like Leigh Leigh’s and in the insight the play provides into the contemporary workings of Australian masculinity and mateship. The play coaxes the audience to revel in the playful larrikinism of Ricko – “How does it feeeeel!” (2) – while horrifying them into the realisation that for many young men there are only a few short steps from anger to real violence. Although the play is short and contains little subplot, it is far from didactic. The script’s dramaturgical construction makes us think through what is not said. The major events (the party itself, the rape and murder, the boys’ testimonies) are represented in short elliptical scenes that scaffold the increasingly tense interactions between pairs of central characters – mostly Jared and Ricko and Jared and Rachel – with Jade’s monologues to Tracy providing an intimate (though

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incomplete) portrait of the victim and underscoring just how young she and those around her were. These features draw us into various imaginings, not only of place – such as an Australian beach or working-class community – but into the place of adolescence with its attendant fears, boredom, restless energy, gender conflicts, and hopes. A Property of the Clan does not aim to tell the story of a personal catastrophe or singular event; its language and gender constructions open up a text where audiences are compelled to face their culture’s propensity for collective violence, particularly against women. As Enright said of the script: Though the characters and much of the narrative were fictional, in the Hunter Valley the play [A Property of the Clan] was mostly seen as a documentary account of real events; but my concern has never been with the facts – horrible as they were – of one girl’s abuse and death at the hands of a group of boys […] the concern of the play was why any group of boys abuse any girl, and how they come to do it. (Enright 1996: vii)

Following the success of Freewheels’ tour of A Property of the Clan to schools across Australia, Enright was commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) in 1994 to develop the play further for a production at The Wharf in Sydney. Enright chose to write a new play, Blackrock, which included more adult characters and which simultaneously shifted the text away from the Leigh Leigh case and toward the individualised story of Jared. Many narrative details were expanded and changed with this adaptation into a full-length mainstage drama. As Enright noted in an interview with Louise Hollingworth: Blackrock takes a narrative strand which is implicit, and scarcely dramatized in Clan, and makes it the central dramatic impulse of the new play: the guilt of a silent witness. Jared’s silence about what he has seen, a strong element in the earlier play, becomes the force which drives him away from his mother and girlfriend, and leads him to complicity with Ricko. (Hollingworth 1997)

Morrow and San Roque comprehensively catalogue and critique these changes further to examine the narration of Leigh Leigh’s murder across journalistic, legal, sociological and literary texts. They argue convincingly that the “political force” of Enright’s text was blunted in the development of Blackrock because “[its] structure


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divorces the crime from a framework of institutionalized sexual(ized) violence and locates it in the narrow realm of a relationship between parents and their uncontrolled children” (494). Morrow and San Roque further explain how in Blackrock the drama is “focused on the localized request for an alibi” such that the violence that kills Tracy becomes “gender neutral” (492) and Ricko’s ultimate suicide “relieves the community of Blackrock from the burden of having to accept collective responsibility” (496). Parental characters in Blackrock are expanded (no doubt to suit the STC’s audience demographic) and this has the effect of divesting the original work of its central focus on youth and making the adults’ culpability more explicit prior to Ricko’s death. The classroom scenes from A Property of the Clan, whereby Tracy’s treatment is contextualised by a contemporary social history of violence and discrimination, are removed and the focus on the role of language is somewhat diminished. Furthermore, as Felicity Holland and Jane O’Sullivan argue, the 1997 film of Blackrock further presents the perpetrators as “lovable larrikins” and erases the young women as “insignificant sheilas” (84). Once we get to the film, Tracy is no longer imagined. She is portrayed on celluloid and as a result the fractures and absences – which make A Property of the Clan s o provoking and unsettling particularly for a youth-specific audience drawn to imagine the events in their own contexts – are filled in. It is no longer a tragic text but a good story about an ugly crime. Indeed, controversy has surrounded the transformation of Leigh Leigh’s experience into entertainment to this extent, with members of the Newcastle community expressing their sense of violation and exploitation at the filming of Blackrock at Stockton Beach near Newcastle (Morrow and San Roque 1996: 478). Since their publication in 1994 and 1996 respectively, A Property of the Clan and Blackrock have been used extensively as pretexts for education and other youth theatre work. Although it appears that due to its mainstage and filmic profile, Blackrock has been produced more frequently,1 A Property of the Clan’s economy allows for more ample exploration of the characters’ relationships and motivations. For instance, the four actors required for the play’s performance are cleverly doubled at times, testing the audience’s empathy and adding depth to the portrayal of gender difference. The actor playing Ricko also plays the young “swot”, Glenn, discouraging

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the kind of audience identification desired in the realist genre. Instead, following Brecht, the doubling opens the performance text for critique and allows a compelling amalgam of Aristotelean tragedy and Brechtian defamiliarisation. A Property of the Clan also avoids neat resolution, providing open-ended departure points for educational and interactive activities. Cracka Theatre Troupe took advantage of this aspect in their 1996 production of A Property of the Clan in Brisbane that was accompanied by a forum theatre piece expanding the themes of discrimination, peer relations, and the uses and abuses of language. Directed by Leah Mercer, this post-show performance helped facilitate more directly the script’s aim to “get people talking”. Significantly, the Cracka Troupe did not develop the forum piece on a similarly violent situation of rape or murder. They transfigured and projected the main themes onto an unrelated situation whereby a teacher–student relationship becomes the focus for gossip and misinterpretation by a school community. It was a believable scenario performed with playful exaggeration to counterpoint the tensions of Enright’s script;2 in this way, it actively engaged young people in role play to test how they might respond in their own school environments to the issues raised in the play. The later Blackrock has also inspired adjunct youth-specific performances and interactive educational drama. However, it is interesting to note how, in Blackrock projects, attention is often drawn back to the issues foregrounded in A Property of the Clan. For instance, Parameter Pilots, a youth theatre group associated with Backbone Youth Arts, staged a group-devised theatrical response to Blackrock during La Boite’s 1997 season of Enright’s play in Brisbane. Significantly, the Parameter Pilots’ performance re-invested the Blackrock script with a strong gender critique that had been arguably lost in its transfiguration from A Property of the Clan. The Pilots’ devising workshops focused on issues of female sexuality and the young performers experimented with shifting the perspective of some of the Blackrock scenes to re-engage the mainly absent and stereotyped young women in the play. Grounded by the Prodigy song ‘Firestarter’, their highly physical presentation was a response to what they perceived as the conservatism of Blackrock. With the song’s aggressive lyrics, they projected a provocative irony onto the imagined character of Tracy and reclaimed A Property of the Clan’s


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forceful language style: “I’m the trouble starter, punkin’ instigator. I’m the fear addicted, danger illustrated […] I’m the filth you hated, filth infatuated. Yeah, I’m the pain you tasted, well intoxicated” (Prodigy 1997). Directed specifically to a youth audience (as distinct from La Boite’s targeted general audience), the piece included large screen video projection and other contemporary music samples to “explore, value and affirm young people’s role, not just as consumers but as creators of culture and creators of cultural product” (Backbone Youth Arts 1997: 18). Similarly, the process-drama activity central to ‘Investigation Blackrock’, a Drama-in-Education unit devised by teachers Sue Davis and Debbie Wall and presented at the 1997 National Association of Drama in Education (NADIE) Conference, re-centres the perspectives of young women and firmly places the issues and themes of Blackrock back within school contexts: “The drama begins with evidence that a female student (Maddy) has been missing school and not completing work” (Davis and Wall 1997: 1). While stopping short of re-engaging the broader historical referents of prejudice and discrimination evident in A Property of the Clan, Davis and Wall supply newspaper clippings about the Leigh Leigh murder case as pre-texts; although they indicated during the NADIE workshop that during their own pilot teaching of the unit, they found their students showed little interest in Leigh Leigh’s specific case. Instead, students were drawn to moments of possibility in their devised drama that connected to their own experience and they imagined how they would avoid and respond to similar events in their own community. Nick Enright’s A Property of the Clan has lived far beyond its initial conception as a theatrical response to the aftermath of Leigh Leigh’s tragic death. Its strong community-based script development accorded with Enright’s values as a collaborator and the play’s continued relevance lies in Enright’s skill in addressing without didacticism the prejudice and discrimination, collective violence, and difficult constructions of youth masculinity that continue to challenge Australian society today. Distinct from Blackrock, A Property of the Clan works for both what is said and what is not said: a fine balance which also trademarks the kind of approach Enright took as a teacher of excellence. Just as his rudey nudey carnival lions will continue to delight and inspire children and their parents, the language play of

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A Property of Clan – even if rather more hardcore – will continue to open moments of presence and possibility “to get people talking”.

Notes 1

2

The AusStage database of Australian performances indicates that A Property of the Clan was toured by commissioning company Freewheels and shows only one other non-professional production (although reference to Cracka Theatre Troupe’s 1996 professional season at The Cement Box theatre is not yet listed). In contrast, there have been multiple productions of Blackrock recorded: seven student and amateur and three professional. While the AusStage entries are not comprehensive, these figures do reflect the comparative popularity of these scripts for performance. For instance, at one point in the forum scenario, a headmaster insists that one of his students should sit on an undersized chair opposite his desk during a consultation. Playing his towering height for comic effect in his characterisation of the headmaster, actor Jean Marc Russ effectively divested himself of the menacing portrayal of Ricko (whom he had played earlier) in the eyes of the audience. This also provided an accessible intervention cue for the young spectators to easily correct a visual as well as verbal power imbalance.

Works cited ‘2003 Brisbane Writers’ Festival Program’. On line at: www.brisbanewritersfestival.com.au (consulted 20 August 2005). Backbone Youth Arts. 1997. Annual Report. Brisbane. Clarke, Terence. 2005. Conversation with the author, Sydney (12 August 2005). Davis, Sue and Debbie Wall. 1997. ‘Investigation Blackrock’. Workshop and paper presented at National Association of Drama in Education Conference (Newtown Performing Arts School, Sydney, July 1997). Dodds, Troy. 2005. ‘2005 Inductee: Nick Enright’. On line at: http://www.aussietheatre.com/halloffame.htm (consulted 25 September 2007). Enright, Nicholas. 1990. Carnival of the Animals: Verse to Accompany the Grand Zoological Fantasia of Camille Saint-Saens. Crows Nest: ABC Enterprises. —— 1994. A Property of the Clan. Paddington: Currency. —— 1996. Blackrock. Paddington: Currency. —— 2003. ‘Collaboration and Community’ in Australasian Drama Studies 42: 14–25. Hall, Sandra. 1995. ‘The Enright Stuff’ in The Australian Magazine (10–11 June 1995). Hollingworth, Louise. 1997. Interview with Nick Enright, unpublished transcript. Brisbane. Kelly, Veronica. 1994. ‘“A Form of Music”: An Interview with Nick Enright’ in Australasian Drama Studies 24: 58–76. Morrow, Jonathan and Mehera San Roque. 1996. ‘In Her Death She Remains as the Limit of the System: Notes Towards an Ethical Writing of Collective Sexual Violence’ in Sydney Law Review 18: 474–502.


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Prodigy. 1997. ‘Firestarter’ lyrics. On line at: http://www.lyricsdepot.com/ prodigy/firestarter.html (consulted 25 September 2007). ‘Michael Tuahine’ in Vibe Australia 68. s.d. On line at: www.vibe.com.au/vibe/ corporate/celebrity_vibe/showceleb.asp?id=205 (consulted 20 July 2005). Weber, David. 2003. ‘Tribute to Nick Enright’. Transcript of report on PM, ABC Radio National. On line at: www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2003/s821038 (consulted 14 July 2005).

Chapter 6 Enright’s Mongrels as Intervention in the Canon of Contemporary Australian Drama Veronica Kelly Abstract Mongrels, premiered in 1991, deals in fictionalised form with the playwrights Peter Kenna and Jim McNeil. The interwoven personalities and obsessions of Australian stage writers create a rich intertextual tradition which “thickens” and personalises the contexts in which theatre writing is produced, particularly erasing the distinctions between 1970s New Wave and pre-New Wave theatrical activity. Issues of love, seduction, sexuality, ambition and their personal costs are played out in metatheatrical form, anatomising the survival of the artist in a culture ever avid for scandal, outlawry and artistic innovation. By reference to the themes and structures of the plays of Kenna and McNeil, Mongrels creates a close reading of discourses of gayness, working-class experience, Irish Catholic ethnicity and camp. Enright questions and animates their manifestations in Australian drama and in the national imaginary.

In the last months of 1991, Australian theatre saw the nearly simultaneous emergence of at least three plays dealing with dramatists’ fictionalised dealings with their internal furies of creativity, and the costs borne by principals and bystanders. Michael Gow’s Furious played at the Wharf for the Sydney Theatre Company, Alma De Groen’s The Girl Who Saw Everything premiered at the Melbourne Theatre Company, and on 7 November 1991 Nick Enright’s Mongrels opened at the Ensemble directed by Rhys McConnachie.1 Of the latter, as the author states, “all relationships […] are inventions of its author, as are its events, with one or two exceptions. These events which I have borrowed from life are a matter of public record.” Also, “The relationship between Burke and O’Hara is one based on antagonism – and intimacy – neither of which were present in the historical bond” (Cochrane 1991: 20). That the play is set in the early 1970s and alludes by fictionalised re-creation to the playwrights Peter Kenna and Jim

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McNeil is likewise a matter of public record. This chapter deals with information about these three writers, Kenna, McNeil and Enright, already published, and does not speculate or tap into the rich repertoire of oral and journalistic anecdote surrounding the historical figure of McNeil, in particular. While of doubtful value in terms of strictest historical accuracy, such mythologising supplies the public understanding of McNeil’s sometimes outrageous conduct amongst the Sydney bourgeoisie and literati, and records the “outlaw” discourse which surrounded McNeil in his later days (see, for example, Ellis 1985). The three writers are bound together by theatrical links and some personal contact. As one of the many literary and legal figures who championed McNeil, Kenna recorded their relations in his perceptive ‘Introduction’ to the Currency edition of the Collected Plays; he also wrote a tribute to McNeil at his death in 1982 (Kenna 1984: 45).2 Enright knew Kenna (but not McNeil) personally, and wrote his obituary in 1987, calling him a “poet of the everyday and domestic […] a mordant wit who gave voice to the inarticulate, a nester who understood the ruthless and dispossessed” (Enright 1987: 3). Mongrels cleverly manipulates theatrical intertextualities and nomenclatures. The Ensemble production gained much resonance by casting as O’Hara Tony Sheldon – the creator of the role of Kenna’s semi-autobiographical character Joe Cassidy in the Nimrod premiere of A Hard God in 1973, and also in the trilogy The Cassidy Album (A Hard God, Furtive Love and An Eager Hope), performed at the Adelaide Festival and Sydney in 1978. The “Kenna” character is named Vincent O’Hara, the “McNeil” one is Edmund Burke: as the historical echoes of the name suggest, they make up a composite personality – the leader of the ill-fated expedition from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria 1860–1861 being Robert O’Hara Burke. The Irish-literary theme is continued in the name of their eager apprentice, Craig Sheridan, whose eventual partner is a set designer and later film producer, aptly named Lydia – gesturing to the character Lydia Languish in R. B. Sheridan’s Restoration comedy The Rivals. Burke’s daughter Joey’s androgynous name echoes, with similar comic gender confusion, that of the ingénue “Lesley” in Kenna’s rustic farce, Listen Closely (1977). And while Mongrels renders undecidable the “real” gender of Burke’s professed true love-object “Rose”, the canny

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theatre-goer can pick up the reference to Tennessee Williams via the rose tattoo sported by the character Ross.3 According to John McCallum, “one of the great pleasures of this play is that it reclaims, for a new generation, these two flawed but deeply honest writers, whose work is known to generations of school students but whose influence has waned” (McCallum 1991: 14). Both playwrights are revivified and recontextualised through their creative re-imagining in Enright’s play, and their narrative preferences provide multiple grids by which recent drama may be re-read and recanonised. Mongrels deploys these shifting reading grids by constructing, now a “McNeil” and now a “Kenna” scene or situation. The antagonists find themselves enmeshed in plots sometimes of their own prototype’s devising, and sometimes, ironically, in dramatic complications all too clearly the property of their opponent. James Waites, for example, professes disappointment at Enright’s decision to end on a “nice-guy Kenna-type ending – a resolution with hope for the future”, and would have preferred a more McNeil-type confrontational conclusion (Waites 1991: 16–17). Indeed, claiming that “Gow’s radicality and originality [in Furious] are far more important” than another well-crafted play like Mongrels, Waites asserts that Enright plays O’Hara to Gow’s Burke. Thus the process of re-inscription of writerly canons via both dramaturgy and critique can be further extended. The “well-crafted” Mongrels, however, contains numerous fragments of the fictional plays of Burke, O’Hara and Sheridan, which subvert the naturalistic master-style. Its suspense plot is constructed around three clearly signalled pivots: a challenge, a curse, and a counter-curse. An analytic summary of the text will situate the issues at stake in the narrative. As described by its author, the play questions “What are the qualities necessary for human survival and particularly for survival as an artist?” and “What is the relationship between living a ‘good’ life and a ‘bad’ life, and one’s survival?” (Cochrane 1991). Survival, sexual and personal, focuses the action of the first scene, where two prisoners, Dingo and Rose, enact a menacing scene of seduction; this in fact turns out to be a prison performance of part of Burke’s first full-length play ‘Only the Heartless Survive’, later aptly renamed ‘A Dog’s Life’ when restaged outside. Lydia Curtin, an agent and set designer, has brought her friend Elaine Vanderfield to the prison to witness this exciting new talent; Elaine is a small-goods

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heiress and theatre producer. In terms of Australian theatre history, both Elaine’s professional influence and her dilettante status are deliberately anachronistic for the early 1970s, since this character recalls the now-banished influence of the pre-“renaissance” theatre matriarchs whose reign was already by the late 1960s being displaced by male-dominated subsidised state companies. Elaine sends the script to her close friend O’Hara for his comment and editing. From his bed in the dialysis unit, O’Hara urges Elaine to put on his own play, ‘Last Rites’, while persuading her to take a chance on the brilliant new writer: ELAINE: You like it? O’HARA: I love it, I’m afraid. ELAINE: Not just because it’s boy-meets-boy? O’HARA: It’s not. Boy meets bruiser. Bruiser puts boy in frock. Boy sells bruiser down the river. He’s invented a new genre. (Mongrels 9)

Hence the structural expectation is set up that the overall action of Mongrels will follow Burke’s generic pattern, which is McNeil-like but with a twist: it reverses the main action of The Old Familiar Juice. In that play it is Brenda, the “boy in [the] frock”, who is, if not sold down river, at least traded down-market. Who will be betrayed in Mongrels, and who will wear the frock? Upon his release, Burke, with his immense sexual charm and his old-lag’s well-honed ability to summarise and manipulate people’s needs, promptly becomes the enfant terrible of the Sydney smart set: ELAINE: He’s quite a character, isn’t he? DULCIE: I’ll say. He’s just dropped his curry in your pool. And his drink. O’HARA: And his lawyer. (18)

In this scene occurs the first electric confrontation between Burke and O’Hara. Burke sees them as being in professional competition for Elaine, whom Burke intends to appropriate for himself, thus forcing her to choose between her old friend and the new contender. This results in Burke issuing the play’s overt challenge: “I’m going to bury you. Six foot under. Your plays are pissweak” (15). The challenge is not just professional; nor is it strictly a clash of writing styles, since O’Hara and Burke actually have much in common. Personally, they


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share working-class street wisdom, a common ethnic heritage and sexual orientations; and their professional prototypes, Kenna and McNeil, both displayed the ability to work in either realist or nonrealist dramatic forms. Mongrels has been seen as a conflict of talent minus discipline versus discipline minus talent (Hoad 1991); but the main conundrums are basically ethical and culturally resonant ones: can talent survive in our society accompanied with decency? Moreover, how much outrageous and destructive onslaught from its class and sexual others will be absorbed by an effervescent bourgeoisie, avid for fresh talent in its project of purportedly nationalist – but actually class-specific – cultural self-validation? In an article reminiscing about McNeil’s later days, his literary agent Robyn Potter recalls that he was “intrigued by what he saw as the easy success of David Williamson and ‘planned to write him under the table’” (Portus 1986:12). Had Mongrels followed up this particular hint, the stakes of the play would have been very different from the O’Hara–Burke oedipal conflict, which points instead to the crucial early 1970s “nationalist” moment in Australian theatre history where Whitlamesque subsidised – and hence sexy – professional theatre usurped legitimacy from an older tradition of theatrical endeavour, here represented by Kenna both as actor and writer. As the veteran actor Hazel, for whom O’Hara has written numerous battling mum roles, exclaims at Craig’s Opera House premiere, “All those years in the sheds and cellars, and here we all are” (63). She also gently reprimands the new young absurdist writer for his not untypical New Wave gender blindness: “But you’re a naughty boy. Only one woman in the whole show and she turns out to be a man. Or was he meant to be a woman? Remember the girls next time” (63–64). O’Hara’s play ‘Last Rites’ is produced first but is not a critical success; the shrewd Lydia discerns its defect as fatal unfashionability: “It’s so … decent” (19). Backstage after the premiere O’Hara reveals his own fears. His kidney failure means he has been living closely with death for many years, which he believes has driven and focused his writing.4 But now the chance of a kidney transplant operation, through a donation by his sister Dulcie, brings into view his fear of freedom; a predicament he shares with Burke whose freedom from prison in fact destroys his talent. The young writer Craig witnesses an explosive confrontation between his two elders, which results in O’Hara’s advice to Burke to change his solipsistic master-plot:

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“Remember. It’s the boy’s play […] He’s the one who changes. Find a way to give him the last scene” (26). This sets up the possibility for an alternative, “Kenna”-type ending for Mongrels itself in that T h e Cassidy Album provides a prototype for such a transformation: An Eager Hope ends with the frail hero’s survival after his scapegrace and irresponsible brother Francis had caused domestic chaos (see Brisbane 1978). And in point of fact, even as Burke feels himself in the ascendant, he is in fact playing out a “Kenna” scene, since backstage politics form a major part of the action of Kenna’s Furtive Love. Moreover, Kenna dramatised the clash of arrogant youth versus decrepit age in his semi-absurdist two-hander Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted, professionally produced in 1976. Elaine now mounts her acclaimed production of ‘A Dog’s Life’, which consolidates Burke’s role of up-and-coming dramatic lion. He coldly rejects the newly released Ross, the prototype of his character “Rose”, turning Ross’s angry bewilderment into suitable dialogue for the finale of his own play, where “Rose” ceremonially burns “Dingo’s” poems at the head of the latter’s corpse. However, Lydia is showing signs of disaffection, being unimpressed at having her car pranged by the dingo poet, and is moreover angered at Burke’s cavalier treatment of Ross, who has ingratiated himself with the theatrical establishment by posing as Burke’s son. Elaine is happy since she and Burke are going to be married. Craig witnesses another slanging match where Burke monsters O’Hara, but is charmed nonetheless when Burke astutely singles him out for flattery. O’Hara establishes by seeing the rose tattoo that the furtive and mercenary Ross is the original of “Rose”, and buys from him the poems which Burke wrote him in prison, being more interested in possessing this portion of Burke’s talent than in Ross’s offer of a $40 one-night stand. At Elaine’s wedding, O’Hara haunts the occasion like the bad fairy uninvited to the feast. Dulcie is now doubtful that her gift has in fact provided her brother with his freedom, since he is now behaving like “a coiled spring” (48). O’Hara reveals his mission of trying to convince Elaine of Burke’s opportunism and violent past, declaring him incapable of love; and finally shows Elaine his proof, the prison poems written to Ross, having correctly guessed that Burke will have since “written” the same poems to Elaine. But Burke effortlessly isolates O’Hara from Elaine: “You never saw the real rose. Rosemary Josephine Kincaid … Married me to save me. I wrote her those


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poems. Mother of my children” (51). He clinches his victory by informing O’Hara that Elaine will not put on the new play upon which O’Hara has been feverishly working since his operation. This turns O’Hara into an evil queen indeed, pronouncing on Burke the first of the play’s curses, one which structures the rest of the plot: “I hope you never live to see any child of yours” (54). Now Burke’s downward slide commences. The theatre begins rehearsals of his unnamed second play, a fantasy wherein his estranged son (he has abandoned three children) defies his mother to seek contact with his imprisoned father.5 This is too much for Craig, who is aware of Burke’s brutal treatment of his real son, and whose own oedipal relations with Burke are at breaking point. He walks off the show, declaring also the death of realism (56), and taking with him a fictionalised Burke–O’Hara play upon which he has meantime been working. Burke’s new play fails in performance, principally because Burke insists in acting in it, only to dry on the significant cue, “You think after all these years you can learn to love something? Something other than a dog?” (59).6 His rages and drinking increase, such that when he trashes her house Elaine flees to O’Hara, who while increasingly ill from the effects of the transplant is at least using his talents for structure and narrative by successfully adapting scripts for television. He coldly refuses the distraught Elaine’s plea for forgiveness. Not long afterwards Elaine’s child miscarries; it would appear that O’Hara’s curse is in fact taking effect. Craig Sheridan on the other hand is now in the ascendant. Lydia is his partner and – in contrast to Elaine – happily pregnant, and adventuring into the burgeoning movie business. Craig’s play is a huge hit at the Opera House: an expressionist role-playing drama of the new avant-garde which is his version of the Burke–O’Hara professional symbiosis and which starkly foregrounds the sub-text of gendered interdependencies in this relationship. Burke, now a homeless derelict, is next found under O’Hara’s King’s Cross apartment balcony, noisily and fruitlessly demanding sympathy. Before the cops arrive, he places a counter-curse on O’Hara: “You’ll die alone. Noone will come near you. Because you’ve never loved and never been loved” (68). Both competitors curse each other with their own deepest fears. The play’s last scene will reveal whose curse will prevail. As it transpires, while they inflict mutual damage and fight each other nearly to the death, neither curse is completely carried out, since the

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rival dramatists did not calculate on the arrival of a new catalyst character. Burke is lastly revealed in a hospital bed, paralysed and speechless from a stroke, and presumably dying. However, he has an unexpected visitor, his youngest daughter Joey, whose mother has revealed that the exciting playwright she has studied in school is really the father she has believed dead. Full of grit and of generous romantic illusions, Joey plans to use her savings to make a home for Burke where he can continue writing under her care. Ross, Burke’s other “child” figure, turns up in quest of a handout; upon seeing Burke’s helpless condition he instead neatly snitches Joey’s savings. O’Hara, now quite sick, and remorseful about his possession of Burke’s prison poems, arrives to restore them. His presence galvanises Burke into a semblance of speech, and the old energy flows between them once more. Joey is shocked but impressed at the effect O’Hara is having on her father; and upon learning she is Burke’s daughter, O’Hara sees with relief that his curse on Burke has lifted. He offers Joey a job as his secretary, since he is lucratively adapting A Dog’s Life for Lydia’s film production company, for which, thanks to an incautious bargain with Lydia, Burke will not receive a cent. The national dimensions of the intertextuality of Mongrels are inflected through discourses of ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, as well as providing revisionary intervention in both the privileged narratives and the significant silences in constructs of the “national” operating in recent Australian theatre history. Experiences of Irishness, Catholicism and working-class backgrounds are variously shared amongst the three playwrights, but the main frames of reference are those of femininity, masculinity, camp and a somewhat problematic gay perspective. Problematic, in that O’Hara shares with his fictional prototype Kenna a pre-“gay-consciousness” identity as a “homosexual”, and thus never becomes that characteristic 1980s figure, the self-professed gay hero opposing homophobic antagonism. Nonetheless, since O’Hara’s visible illness and increasing fragility superimpose on his character the image of an AIDS victim, the play gains a peculiarly contemporary resonance. The specific term gay was overtly rejected by Kenna in 1978, when he maintained his allegiance to an older school of self-definition by defining “gay” as “the twee-est sort of evasion of what people are” and “part of homosexual guilt” – he preferred “camp” or “poofter” since they take insults and defiantly


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turn them around (Wells 1978). Kenna insisted on the distinction between homosexual acts – frequently opportunistic events when women are in short supply, such as occurs with the characters of Jack Shannon in A Hard God or Bulla in The Old Familiar Juice – and “real” homosexuals, like his Joe in the Cassidy trilogy, or, probably, Brenda in Juice (‘The Loves of Joe Cassidy’; Hayes 1978). The characters Burke and O’Hara, respectively, appear to follow this rough working distinction, although in practice it provides little security of gender identity for Burke, in particular. Camp, as defined by Steven Berkoff, is the sexual underdog’s knowing weapon, borrowed by theatre from the gay world as an apt vehicle for barbed verbal skirmishes, since in both contexts performers must professionally court the perils of self-exposure (Berkoff 1989: 123). Glittering, hilarious and deadly, camp is used in Enright’s play as the main register of contact and conflict between Burke and O’Hara. In this play, camp never cuts loose from its political origins as the dialogic discourse of an underclass confronting an adversarial hegemony. Despite his Cowardesque verbal fireworks, Enright makes it clear that vital and ultimately political issues are being savagely fought for, hence his version of camp never becomes merely style for its own sake. Camp thus allows dangerous ambivalences and sometimes uncontrollable slides between the theatrical and sexual registers, particularly in the love–hate sparring between the principals. It is Burke’s preferred register, and his approach to O’Hara is both self-protectively homophobic and aggressively homosocial. Burke expertly articulates the “larrikin” male argot popularised as a demotic theatrical register by Williamson and Hibberd in the New Wave of the early 1970s, but with its sexualised subtext now dangerously evident. In the discursive battle of the play, Burke aggressively preempts what may be thought of as O’Hara’s specific territorial weapon of queenly bitchery, and projects his gaol-bird version of it at his opponent at twice normal volume. However, he increasingly becomes a prisoner of his own discourse; having constructed O’Hara as “his” Maureen, he finds he cannot survive without him/her, either artistically or emotionally. In Craig Sheridan’s play, an avant-garde hit of the new post-Whitlam artistic renaissance, this symbiotic and transitively gendered relationship is played out by masked characters called “Doggo” and “Maureen”. “Maureen” (played by O’Hara), seated

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helplessly in her/his invalid’s chair, strikingly recalls the hospitalised Man in Alma De Groen’s The Rivers of China (1988), played in the Sydney Theatre Company’s premiere by John Howard, the creator of the character of Burke. By mobilising codes of “transvestism”, both plays construct a transpersonal and transsexual figure of a “woman” whose disabilities as artist are signalled by her/his feminine coding and by physical illness and immobility. Masculinity in Mongrels is related, through its title, to the popular sociobiological image of ferocious ill-bred canines vying for territory, mates and prestige. O’Hara parodies this macho imaging and its conventional narrative outcomes in his summary of a successful television mini-series he has been script-doctoring: Two strong men in the same line of work. Two men who hate each other. And the women who love them. Two hours a week, prime time. Tough talking in the boardroom, heavy breathing in the bedroom […] It’s a big hit. Even on the Sunshine Coast. Dulcie says they’ve had to change the housie night at St Columba’s. (59–60)

The play sets out to discover which of the two writers is the bigger Mongrel, and phrases such as “mean mongrel” and “mongrel bastard” are hurled at both combatants by each other and by various other characters whom they injure, outwit or affront. In this canine territorial competition, the gentlemanly, courteous O’Hara turns out to be as fanged an animal as the feral, snarling Burke. Initially, Burke would seem to have pre-empted the claim to natural priority as chief national Mongrel, since in his play ‘A Dog’s Life’ his alter ego character is named Dingo. Upon meeting O’Hara, Burke challenges him through projective feminisation and by denying him his canine specificity: “You’re the top dog. She [Elaine] said.” (14) “You know, she quotes you as a wise old man. And you’re only a cat in a bow-tie” (15). Of the hapless actor who portrays Dingo, Burke opines he is a “dopey shit […] passing himself off as a dingo. More like a basset hound” (35). “They tell you actors are sexual mongrels. Not Roger” (35). Yet Burke’s hyper-masculinist polarised definitions incessantly blur at the edges, as they must since they are shields against the ambivalences innate in the discourse he has elected to wield. However, in Kenna’s own definition of the word, a more enabling, hybridised function of the concept is adumbrated:


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Most artists of any repute are what I call sexual mongrels … They have a balance of the male and female elements in them which enables them to be both women and men realistically. The great screen artists, for instance Valentino, Brando, Garbo, Monroe, Hepburn, were all sexual mongrels in a way. Most good writers have to have that in their natures. I don’t mean that they have to be homosexual: I just mean they must be a blending so you can understand the opposite sex. (Wells 1978: 16)

Mongrels seems to be consciously deploying Kenna’s own definition of mongrelisation as emotional androgyny and hence creativity, and extending it further to denote the ruthlessness and ambition necessary to capitalise on such creativity. Initially seen on his dialysis machine, O’Hara draws this connection by quipping “It shouldn’t happen to a dog … Let alone a creative artiste” (7). The vociferously bisexual Burke could thus seem to be a bigger Mongrel than the fastidious and chaste old-time “homosexual” O’Hara, but the contest is in fact not so easily weighted. While Burke never renounces the masculinist speaking position, O’Hara, the play’s sick and frail “good” person, who has been pronounced clinically dead once already, actually has the competitive edge. He counter-challenges Burke’s attempted sexual put-downs by pre-emptively claiming a more radical, and more selfaware, gender mongrelisation: O’HARA: You think all us cats answer to girls’ names? You’re not inside anymore. Things are a touch more complex out here. BURKE: Are they, Scarlett? O’HARA: Yes. And you should learn that quick-smart. You’re a good writer, but your characters are all either/or. Hard-doers or hard-done-by. Scarface or Scarlett. BURKE: Are you trying to tell me you’re Scarface? O’HARA: I’m both. Scarface and Scarlett. Though as a matter of fact, the girls used to call me Maureen. (15)

As for femininity, this is the enigma which haunts the plays of both Kenna and McNeil to varying degrees, and whose presence is imported into Mongrels as something of an answer as well as a question. The clearest example of femininity as a masculinist construct occupying a potent symbolic place in male-to-male dramatic interaction is to be found in the plays of McNeil, and it defines something of Burke’s style and values in Enright’s play. In McNeil’s drama, femininity is mask and costume, and as such a gendered

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emotional function traded between men, liable to be applied to any person or object upon whom affection may be safely bestowed. It is so bestowed on Stanley (Old Familiar Juice), on Brenda (How Does Your Garden Grow?), on the unnamed Woman in the same play, and in Jack upon a plastic bag filled with warm water. Stanley is initially resistant, then rendered comatose by prison brew, but the play’s famous ending suggests that Bulla’s need is too great to be overridden and that time is on his side: DADDA: … Wodder you doin’ … ? BULLA: Who? Me? … I’m doin’ fifteen years. (The Old Familiar Juice: 92)

Like later McNeil characters, Bulla takes steps to feminise Stanley in his approaches, even though he simply desires male-to-male sexual contact.7 Emotional needs, however, are more conventionally satisfied in How Does Your Garden Grow? by Mick and Brenda’s replication of the ideal gender roles of lower-middle-class suburban marriage, pre-war vintage: MICK: Whoo, I’m rooted. […] BRENDA: Don’t talk like that … It doesn’t suit you at all. (How Does Your Garden Grow?: 116)

Brenda is the most successfully and willingly feminised of McNeil’s characters – an ideal blend of housewife and temptress always ready with a cup of tea to comfort his man, no matter how arbitrarily he may be treated, even when being passed on to Sam, Mick’s grubby mate who is in dire need of Brenda’s housewifely skills. When the prospect beckons of being remanded into his wife’s care, Mick quickly overcomes his repugnance at her “aggressive, mannish” apparel (163), although he takes care to produce for his cell-mates the standard compensatory fantasy of feminised wifehood: Well, sheilas are all the same, aren’t they? … Bangles and bits of this and that hanging off ’em … Yeah, well yer could say she looked real pretty, you know, if it’s the real feminine sort of thing yer go for. Perfume, and plenty of tit … all that. (180)

But as Kenna discerns in his discussion of this play, “The person [Mick] describes is an idealisation of Brenda” (Kenna 1987: 533).


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Jack, in McNeil’s discordantly savage last play, pours out words of tenderness to his plastic bag “woman” such as Brenda never hears from Mick; Brenda must make do with the taciturn masculinity model. Jack’s cell-mate Tom fears for his sanity and dobs in Jack to the authorities, a course of action which leads to Jack’s rage, his eventual suicide in the psychiatric unit, and – incidentally – to the destruction of the objectified “woman” in the fight between the two men. The more improbable the signifier of “woman” in McNeil’s plays, the more likely it is to successfully fulfil its gendered role. Femininity fits the Woman least successfully, Stanley perforce, Brenda conventionally and the plastic bag perfectly. Male emotional contact seems to be the tenor for which femininity serves as the vehicle, and upon this male-constructed fantasm of “natural” femininity is erected in turn the complementary and purely relational fantasm of a superior masculinity, as that which trades and negotiates for the available femininity. When Tom refuses to play the game, or Jack plays it too intensely, the whole symbolic gender system soon lies in catastrophic ruin, like Jack’s slashed plastic bag bleeding its warm water on the floor of their cell.8 When Burke confronts O’Hara, he predictably tries the wellworn tactic of feminising the opposition, a gesture which cannot but imply complementary components of desire, need and thwarted identification: “You’re all so caring in this business. All of you, kneedeep in care … Here’s the queen of the carers. Night-nurse Maureen” (35). Burke indulges in heavy verbal and physical flirtation with O’Hara, camouflaged variously as high camp and as no-shit male street aggro, but his own emotional investment in the aggression and competition remains unacknowledged and volatile. As Baudrillard notes, “Challenge and seduction are quite similar”, and Burke runs the risk of being seduced by his own seductions. “In a challenge one draws the other into one’s area of strength, which in view of the potential for unlimited escalation, is also his or her area of strength. Whereas in a strategy of seduction one draws the other into one’s area of weakness, which is also his or her area of weakness” (Baudrillard 1990: 83). The more “feminine” O’Hara thus has the upper hand in this volatile transaction, since according to Baudrillard, “We seduce with our weakness, never with strong signs or powers” (Ibid). In a scene intertextually reminiscent of Kenna’s Furtive Love (1980) – where George urges Joe to follow his inclinations – Burke poses as the

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benevolent old worldly libertine when urging O’Hara to proposition the young actor Craig: BURKE: Go on, front him. What say you cark it tomorrow and never know? Just what you need tonight, something warm up against you. Go after him now, quick. O’HARA: It’s been too long. I’ve lost it. BURKE: But you want it. I smell that too. I’d take you home and root you myself if I believed in mercy-fucking. (24–25)

O’Hara, being “both Scarlett and Scarface”, maintains his poise in the face of these rough-and-tumble canine overtures, but when Burke forbids Elaine to produce his next play, camp repartee no longer provides adequate refuge for O’Hara’s rage, such that he launches at Burke a potent Celtic curse which is in danger of rebounding on himself. Burke, for his part, becomes the victim of his own challenge to O’Hara: “I’ll bury you.” In the play’s final scene he takes his place in the hospital sickbed in which we first saw O’Hara; ironically, he is now playing out the very finale of O’Hara’s script ‘Last Rites’ which he had previously loftily scorned: “What would you fucking know? You and your little wrap-up hospital. Close your eyes Mumma. What kind of last scene is that?” (26) The other conventional macho narrative re-inscribed in Mongrels, besides “two men who hate each other and the women who love them”, is the durable patriarchal father–son romance. The play questions both the naturalness and the efficacy of this venerable dramatic pattern, in that none of the filiations attempted by either Burke or O’Hara are successful, at least where their child-substitutes are male. Ross, Burke’s inarticulate rough-trade cell-mate, fictionalised as “Rose”, is the first and last of his surrogate sons, who substitutes for, and poses as, Burke’s estranged son Eddie, only to be rejected by him at the height of his theatrical success and Burke’s affaire with Elaine. “Don’t fucking touch me”, Burke snarls at Ross/Rose, who is pathetically reminding him of “all the things you said in them poems”, “We just say what we have to say to get what we want” (30–31). The action here deliberately recalls How Does Your Garden Grow? where Mick is pragmatic in dumping Brenda for his wife and freedom, but Enright has a less kindly view of expedient passions and he writes a far more savage scene.


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Craig Sheridan, the young actor/playwright who apprentices himself to the two elder writers, tries to set up a filial relationship of courtship with them, and is variously flirted with, fostered and savagely rejected by both men. After playing the O’Hara role of Bernie in the latter’s semi-autobiographical play ‘Last Rites’, Craig pleads to O’Hara for some warmth and recognition, in a scene intertextual with Joe’s emotional pleas with Jack in A Hard God: You never even touch me. All that touching, Why not me? I can’t believe you’re this cold. You don’t write cold. […] I want to be let inside. Where Elaine is. You love her, she loves you. Let me in. Just part of the way. (23)

O’Hara initially responds to these overtures, as it is evident that, of the two, Craig has selected O’Hara as his principal father/mentor. However Craig is himself something of a young pup who is studying to be a full-on Mongrel, or artist, and when he in turn commences to write, ambition and competition inevitably, if painfully, take him out of their orbit. After a stormy scene, he walks off Burke’s second play, which its author has catastrophically insisted on staging without benefit of O’Hara’s expert shaping. “I’m too old for it anyway”, Craig tells Elaine. “Get another son. And get hold of O’Hara” (57). Craig’s culminating filial love-gift to O’Hara, who has fostered his acting career, is the Doggo and Maureen play, after which he naïvely begs O’Hara for recognition. All he gets is “What you set out to do you’ve done very well” with the icy adjunct, “that’s not a compliment” (65). Only in the last scene, with the appearance of Burke’s tough and spirited daughter Joey, does a promising parent–child relationship enter the world of the play, with not the son but the daughter being given “the last scene”, as O’Hara had requested. Whereas it is her idealised father Burke whom Joey has come to seek, she exits upon O’Hara’s arm to be his secretary, companion and likely daughterfigure. “We seduce with our death, our vulnerability, and with the void that haunts us” (Baudrillard 1990: 83). Through his long proximity to death, and principally by his resolute acceptance of gender “mongrelisation”, O’Hara proves the more seductive figure in the eyes of Joey, and possibly of the audience as well. Burke’s curse that O’Hara will die alone will not, it appears, necessarily eventuate, nor will it totally rebound on himself.

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Enright has provided the repertoire with two brilliant male roles, and one is readily captivated by the vitality written into the part of Burke, the dangerously seductive poète maudit: an “outlaw” figure who brilliantly re-animates and re-invents the now somewhat eclipsed personality and talents of Jim McNeil. From the perspective of his own working-class origins and marginalised sexuality, Kenna gave his explanation of McNeil’s carnivalesque attractions for the bourgeois literati wherein class, gender, ethnic and nationalist discourses are interestingly cross-read: “It’s the anti-authoritarian streak we Australians have. If a man in his safe middle-class world can drink with Ned Kelly, he feels more like a man. If a woman spends the night with Kelly, she feels more like a woman” (Oakley 1982: 40). It is by flirting with sexual ambivalence and social liminality that the fantasms of “real” gendered or national identities are reinforced. As the Ned Kelly or “outlaw” figure, Burke the dingo interestingly intervenes in and interrogates a long tradition of such overly heterosexual masculine character types in Australian drama. From a perspective two decades later, Mongrels interrogates 1970s Australian theatre’s eager acceptance of McNeil’s conciliatoryseeming prison plays, with their assimilable naturalistic textures. It questions, too, its embarrassed marginalisation of the affronting and non-naturalist Jack, a play written out of intense psychological and cultural pressures which itself in turn bears uncomfortably on the conventional discourses of masculinity, sexuality and gender currently acceptable in much mainstream playwriting. Mongrels transmutes McNeil’s streetwise panache, his pain and confusion, into a species of Ortonesque black comedy, without occluding the savagery and seriousness of the non-hegemonic discursive achievements pioneered in his drama. Yet in many ways Mongrels is a warm homage to Peter Kenna, as person and as an artist working within a particular place, culture and time. Enright doesn’t play up Kenna’s sustaining Catholic faith which returned to him in his later years (Nicklin 1975), while endowing his O’Hara with its original’s old-world civility of style and innate decency, with his characteristic fusion of physical fragility, barbed wit and spiritual resilience. The religion foregrounded in Mongrels is rather that of theatre. Through the fictionalised “Bernie” of ‘Last Rites’, O’Hara declares “But I didn’t lose my faith, Mumma. I’d found another religion. With its own sacristy, its own rites. The


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rites are the same in the end” (22–23). Mongrels builds a tribute to its predecessors in pre-subsidy Australian playwriting. As O’Hara aptly observes to Craig, “We all go back a long way. Doing plays in church halls, bringing our own costumes, papier mâché props, all that. Believe it or not, there was art before Gough” (23). Enright’s intervention into the process of canon-formation complements the critical interventions in the construction of Australian drama currently produced in post-colonial theory, feminist and gender studies, and multi-cultural re-territorialisations of national definitions. From a multi-cultural perspective, it self-reflexively sites itself in the long tradition of Australian drama produced by Irish and Catholic writers that deals in knotty Jansenite moral complexities. Certainly, Mongrels offers a rich and rewarding new text in its exploration of the ethical implications of the gendered constructs current in our cultural discourses, whether or not they specifically intersect the self-constructions of the creative artist. By its conscious intervention in a submerged tradition of gay playwriting traceable at least to Patrick White and Sumner Locke Elliot, the play seems principally to invite the intervention of “queer theory” into the processes of Australian theatrical analysis. In her Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues for the re-assessment of the European and other literary renaissances, to recognise where and how the power in them of gay desires, people, discourses, prohibitions, and energies were manifest. We know enough already, however, to know with certainty that in each of these renaissances they were central. (No doubt that’s how we will learn to recognise a renaissance when we see one). (Sedgwick 1990: 58–59)

Mongrels clearly invites such re-conceptualisation, immediately of the significant theatrical renaissance of the early 1970s, but furthermore, in Barry Humphries’ alleged phrase, of “all those little cultural renaissances we always seem to be having”.

Acknowledgement This essay first appeared in Southerly 54(2) (June 1994): 5–22, and is republished here with permission.

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Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6

7

8

For the similarities in theme and even set design between Furious and Mongrels see Peter Robinson’s unnamed review in Muse: Canberra Arts and Entertainment 105 (February 1992): 28–29. McNeil died aged forty-seven in St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney, in May 1982: see his obituary ‘Prisoner Playwright’, The Sydney Morning Herald (17 May 1982): 8. In Hayes (1978), Kenna reports his inspirations as Williams, Shaw, Brecht and Shakespeare. For impressions of Kenna’s health and attitudes both before and after his 1974 operation, see Katharine Brisbane (1976), ‘A New Lease of Life’. In his obituary, Enright agrees with her account of the side-effects of the postoperative drugs, which weakened Kenna’s joints and caused distressing emotional anxiety. This wishful reconciliation is interestingly counter to McNeil’s own reported experience with his six children: “I rang once when I had a few drinks and spoke to my 14-year old daughter. I said ‘Hello, is this [sic] your daddy’ and do you know what she answered? ‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember you.’ It broke my heart.” Clive Bolton, ‘A Scotch Helps to Set the Prison Stage’ in Weekend Australian (10–11 September 1977): 7. McNeil’s last play Jack was produced at the Nimrod in 1977. The director Ken Horler gives his account of the final preview where severely drunk McNeil leapt onstage to attack the actor playing the Warder, to be quelled by Horler with assistance. See Barry Oakley, ‘Jim McNeil: A Prisoner of His Own Guilt’. Mongrels attributes the failure of Burke’s unnamed last play to a comparable blurring of art and life, where persona bizarrely struggles with creator. Kenna explicates the gender dynamics of this relationship, using his customary distinction between “homosexuals” and homosexual behaviour, in ‘The Plays of Jim McNeil’ (531). Kenna’s original title for his own transvestite play Mates was, apparently, ‘A Dream of Manhood’; see Brisbane, ‘A New Lease of Life’ (24).

Works cited ‘The Loves of Joe Cassidy’ in Campaign 32 (May 1978): 16. Baudrillard, Jean. 1990. Seduction trans. Brian Singer. London: Macmillan. Berkoff, Steven. 1989. I Am Hamlet. London: Faber. Brisbane, Katherine. 1976. ‘A New Lease of Life’ in National Times (14–19 June 1976): 24 —— 1978. ‘A Human’s Defiance of God’ in Theatre Australia (May): 24–25. Cochrane Peter. 1991. ‘A Hard God, A Dog’s Life’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (6 November 1991): 20. Ellis, Bob. 1985. ‘How I Killed Jim McNeil, the Dustbin of the Yard’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (10 October 1985): 51. Enright, Nick. 1987. ‘Peter Kenna, Battler to the End’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (30 November 1987): 3. Hayes, Suzanne. 1978. ‘Interview with Peter Kenna’. Adelaide: Adelaide College of TAFE Educational Media Unit, [1978]. [sound recording, 58 mins]


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Hoad, Brian. 1991. ‘The Odd Couple’ in The Bulletin (26 November 1991): 112–113. Kenna, Peter. 1977. Talk to the Moon, Listen Closely, Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted Sydney: Currency Press. —— 1984. ‘A Convict of Society Who Beat Man’s Worst Enemy’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (2 June 1984): 45; reprinted 1987 as ‘The Plays of Jim McNeil’ in Holloway, Peter (ed.) Contemporary Australian Drama. Sydney: Currency Press: 530–534. McCallum, John. 1991. ‘Pleasurable Study of Writers’ Pain’ in The Australian (11 November 1991): 14. McNeil, Jim. 1987. The Old Familiar Juice in Collected Plays. Sydney: Currency Press. Nicklin, Lenore. 1975. ‘Sister’s Gift Rescues a Writer’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (11 January 1975): 8. Oakley, Barry. 1982 ‘Jim McNeil: A Prisoner of His Own Guilt’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (12 June 1982): 40. Portus, Martin. 1986. ‘The Positive Side of Suffering’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (26 August 1986): 12. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Waites, James. 1991. ‘The Furies of Talent’ in Sydney Review (December 1991): 16–17. Wells, Frank. 1978. ‘The Drama of Peter Kenna in Campaign 32 (May 1978): 15.

Chapter 7 Enright on the Record: Evidence from the Television Archives of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Adrian Kiernander Abstract The television archives of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation contain significant material dealing with the work and career of Nick Enright. This includes footage of some of his plays in performance, interviews with him, and commentary on his work by critics and theatre practitioners. This chapter describes and analyses some of the more important contents of this archival material, under three main headings: representations of masculinity, meta-theatre, and Enright’s success as a playwright for actors. It makes special reference to The Venetian Twins, Mongrels (which is a significant turning point in Enright’s career), Blackrock, Good Works, A Poor Student, Cloudstreet, and The Boy from Oz. The chapter argues that the material in the archive illustrates important aspects of Enright’s career and his rising profile after 1991, when he began to be accepted as a serious playwright, but that this success and the move to larger-scale productions paradoxically involved a certain loss of artistic control.

In one scene in Nick Enright’s Mongrels, the character Vincent O’Hara is in hospital for a kidney transplant. He is a successful and well-known playwright, but he notes acerbically that his urine has had more serious analysis in hospital than his plays ever had outside.1 This line could plausibly be a moment of autobiography on Enright’s part; surprisingly little has been written about the second most popular Australian playwright of the last decade (in terms of the number of productions), and his work has been subjected to less serious analysis than it deserves. This volume will extend that analysis significantly, and I hope that this chapter in particular will help to enable more of it in the future by drawing attention to and analysing the surviving video footage of Enright’s plays in performance, as well as interviews with him and commentary about his work. This investigation has been made possible by a research project entitled Stage on Screen, funded by a Linkages Grant from 2002 to

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2004 from the Australian Research Council. In partnership with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Channel Nine, the project located, copied and began analysing television materials in the archives of both organisations which relate to the history of live theatre in Australia.2 In the case of the work of Nick Enright, the project has discovered over forty pieces of footage which record sequences from nine of his stage plays in rehearsal or performance.3 These range from the briefest of glimpses, such as two tantalising moments of actor Steve Bisley performing in A Man With Five Children,4 through to very extended sequences from some of his plays showing details of sets, costumes, performances, choreography, music and so on. In addition, of course, there is a considerable amount of material that records interviews with Enright and others on the subject of his work in theatre. This chapter looks at what can be learned about the work and career of this influential theatre practitioner from the material in the Stage on Screen collection. As expected, there is considerable material on Cloudstreet – fifteen of the items relate to that production – and The Boy from Oz. Surprisingly, perhaps, there is nothing from the 1989 Daylight Saving, though it is referred to in several of the interviews with Enright. This illustrates one of the limitations of the collection: it is dependent on what was considered newsworthy, and it seems that Daylight Saving was not in that category, perhaps because it was perceived, like its playwright at the time, as rather too lightweight and commercial for serious consideration prior to the appearance of Mongrels in 1991.5 Indeed the footage reveals what an important turning point in Enright’s career Mongrels was. The material clearly illustrates Enright’s important place in Australian theatre – especially the trajectory of his career as a playwright and the sometimes ambivalent consequences of his success. That achievement is shown to have derived from three important aspects of his work: his interest, both professional and personal, in issues of gender and sexuality; his ongoing fascination with metatheatre and the practices, processes and ethics of theatre-making itself; and his breadth of understanding of theatre, especially from an actor’s point of view, which enabled him to write rewarding parts for actors.

Enright on the Record: Evidence from the Television Archives

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Benefits and problems of success The contrast between the small-scale and off-mainstream premiere of Mongrels at the Ensemble Theatre on Sydney’s North Shore and its revival at the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) six years later shows not only the difference between the resources and production values of the two companies, but also the change in Enright’s reputation by the time the state theatre company undertook his work. Apart from the much more expensive look of the revival, the rise in his status is demonstrated by the increase in media interest in Enright at the time of the STC staging. There is footage from the original 1991 production of Mongrels at the Ensemble,6 and from the STC in 1997,7 both productions featuring the same actors, John Howard and Tony Sheldon, in the lead roles. It is significant in tracing Enright’s career that the section of the weekly arts program Express reporting on the revival at the STC is very extensive and includes interviews with influential commentators on Australian theatre such as Katharine Brisbane, as well as comparisons between the two productions and a detailed evaluation of the revisions Enright had made to the script for the new production. It is clear that by 1997 the play was considered big news, and the playwright a much more important name in the industry than six years before. Brisbane observes in the 1997 broadcast that Enright’s esteem as a playwright had grown considerably since the play’s premiere, and much of this can be attributed to the success of Mongrels. However, the recordings suggest that not everything had improved since 1991. In the footage from the earlier production there is a stronger sense of desperate conflict between the two main characters, with John Howard playing the role of Burke as more dishevelled and aggressive. He appears unshaven and with unkempt hair, an earring in his right ear, wearing a yellowish shirt and rumpled brown jacket, and with a discarded tie sticking out of his pocket. He sometimes carries a whisky bottle. He speaks in a deep voice, watching intently for any sign of weakness in his opponent, with a controlled energy that, like the fists thrust into his pockets, seems to offer the imminent threat of physical violence. This contrasts with Sheldon’s lighter voice, more flamboyant hands, neat jackets – a safari jacket in one scene – and prim bow ties, which suit the flexible acerbic sarcasm serving as his weapon of choice. This contrast is not nearly as marked in the footage of the 1997 production. In the later

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staging Burke appears much cleaner, better groomed and more civilised, and with the characters wearing suits they both look more like part of the establishment. The footage reveals a quite different look for the two productions overall. The Ensemble’s has a dirty, gritty, brown, backalley quality to the set and costumes, which is a more dangerous environment for the competitive, scrapping mongrels of the title than the smarter, glossier, better-lit, well-heeled and more colourful atmosphere of the STC production. The dominant image of the later staging is a huge stainless steel and glass balcony in front of an expansive cyclorama lit in vivid pinks and blues. The 1970s Sydney theatre scene in which the play is set is much poorer and provides leaner pickings in the Ensemble production; the two playwrights become more sympathetic – they need to fight hard, both in general and against each other, for whatever scraps they can grab of fame and prosperity. In the STC production the effect is of two rather unsympathetic spoilt narcissists who simply want more than their fair share of the abundance of attention and acclaim on offer. A further difference between the productions is that the two main characters look considerably older and less energised in the later production, especially O’Hara. Sheldon’s hair is the most obvious differentiator, being light brown in the Ensemble production and grey at the STC. The effect in the earlier production by Rhys McConnochie is that of an urgent, realistic and vivid recent memory, aiming to record and commemorate the lives and struggles of the two playwrights, one of whom had died only four years before; whereas the later production by Adam Cook has a more fantasised, romanticised and elegiac feel, bringing back from the more remote past two less real playwrights whose influence was perhaps beginning to fade. In his commentary about the 1997 production for the ABC arts program Express,8 the presenter Stephen Crittenden raises a question about the significance of the third playwright character, Craig; he suggests that the young writer, who closely observes the work of both playwrights, learns from them and finally writes his own satirical play about them which is staged at the Sydney Opera House, may be Enright’s self-portrait. The revised script of Mongrels included a brief glimpse of Craig’s play, which is stylistically unlike anything by Burke or O’Hara; whereas they are both working in versions of naturalism, Craig’s play has a fairy-tale quality. The characters of


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Burke and O’Hara are parodied by actors in animal costumes looking like the scruffy mongrels of the title. In devising Craig’s fantastical play with animal characters, Enright may indeed have been thinking about his own career as a young theatre practitioner. Another piece of footage in the collection shows Enright directing a rehearsal in 1980 of his own adaptation of the eighteenth-century Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi’s fantastically non-naturalistic King Stag, which, like Craig’s play, involves actors dressed as animals.9 Craig’s play in Mongrels has something in common with the younger Nick Enright’s approach to the staging of stories. At the time of the STC production of Mongrels, Enright’s career was about to take a further leap ahead, with the first performances of both The Boy from Oz and Cloudstreet taking place early the next year. It seems paradoxical that while both these productions attracted considerable media attention, much less of it recognised Enright’s contributions than previously. There is material which shows the spare beauty of Neil Armfield’s first production of Cloudstreet and includes the presence of the Aboriginal man who was added to Tim Winton’s story in the stage adaptation, and there is much which records the glamour of the staging of the musical about Peter Allen. But in the case of Cloudstreet, the main focus of the commentary was on the author of the novel and the vision of Armfield as director rather than on Enright and his co-writer Justin Monjo. Predictably, much of the attention given to The Boy from Oz concentrated on Peter Allen’s life, and on the stars of the show, Todd McKenney, Chrissie Amphlett and Angela Toohey who performed as Allen, Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. But despite the fact that there is little acknowledgment or analysis of Enright’s achievement in these cases, the material nevertheless charts the popularity and success of the works, especially the international tour and performances of Cloudstreet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October 2001, reputedly the first production to open in New York after the destruction of the Twin Towers.

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Masculinity Questions of sexuality and gender – especially masculinity – in a social context recur throughout the coverage of Mongrels. Enright himself noted in an interview in 1991 that the play deliberately pits two superficially different versions of masculinity and sexuality against each other.10 O’Hara is overtly and conventionally gay, and in Sheldon’s performance he has many of the stereotyped mannerisms of a mild-mannered gay man from the mid-twentieth century, though this is complicated by the fact that he is no weakling or victim but a survivor with tremendous resilience who outlasts his rival. His sexuality and gender are highlighted by comparison with John Howard’s performance as Burke – much more conventionally rugged, aggressive and masculine in outward behaviour but with a strong hint of same-sex activity which is revealed both through the situation of his autobiographical first play, set in a prison, and in his dominant, predatory behaviour towards Craig. Issues of gender and sexuality, as manifested in conventionally masculine Australian society at the time, are closely related in the script to the vicious competitiveness of both these men, and the harm they cause to each other and the characters around them. In relation to this play, Enright said: As a gay man I would like to believe that gay men are more open about our feelings, and I think to some extent that is true because of the different socialisation that operates, but I think that men in Australia, because of the way we’re conditioned into a world of action and achievement rather than a world of reflection and awareness […] I think that makes us do terrible damage.11

Similar issues are explored in the context of youth culture in Blackrock. One clip shows Paul Bishop as Ricko, the most ominously masculine character in the play, switching from blokey good humour to dangerous xenophobia when confronted by a newcomer to the beach – an obvious outsider with the unacceptably middle-class name of Toby.12 The danger which Bishop’s performance implies at this moment is realised later on when it is revealed that Ricko is guilty of sexual assault and murder. In an interview with Suzy Baldwin, Enright was at pains to point out that he regarded a character like Ricko as a social problem rather than seeing him simplistically as a pathological villain. He described the theme of Blackrock as


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an exploration of male sexual violence – adolescent male sexual violence – and the way in which young men connect with young women and with the other women in their lives.13

He attributed the problems to “a society in which sexual violence is constantly an issue”, and to the discouragement of emotion in the ways young men are brought up. In the same interview he criticised the way in which none of us have the means to communicate feeling to each other, and particularly young people. I think particularly young men, boys, are not given […] access to the expression of feeling, particularly with older men – their fathers and male figures in their lives – and don’t learn a way of communicating with women.

In interviews, Enright emphasised the autobiographical elements in his work, especially those relating to sexuality, which he found the confidence to write about in his later scripts. The honesty of these sequences gives the scenes a powerful sense of courage and danger. Scenes from Good Works in performance stage high-tension situations, including a very sexually charged, dangerous, game-playing sequence in a gay bar where two friends discuss a third man who is checking them out, and a subsequent scene between one of them and the stranger.14 Enright said of the play, in an interview with Stephen Fennelly, that the autobiographical elements are not necessarily located where people might think. In the case of Good Works, it is I think probably commonly assumed by people who know me that I am represented on the stage by the rather timid, middle-class, repressed, gay, would-be artist, and sure, that’s an aspect of me, but the violent, vengeful, passionate kid with the knife is also me. And likewise the two women. They are equally representative of certain aspects of me, and I have to love and accept those bits of me in order to be able to put them on the stage.15

Part of the significance of Enright’s dramatic achievement derives from the fact that he was a pioneer in the conscious theatrical exploration of gender and sexuality in Australia. This was an increasingly important issue in both society and theatrical practice at the time Enright was working (see Bollen, Kiernander and Parr: 2008). Furthermore, he was in a position to be able to use it with confidence and authority as he had come out of a period of depression in the 1980s and learned to bring his personal experience and

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“demons” into his writing – a subject he talked about in a number of interviews. Meta-theatre Mongrels, as a play about three competing playwrights, introduces Enright’s fascination with meta-theatre and his passionate concern with the problems or mechanics of theatre itself. Enright commented on this in a 1991 episode of the arts program Review, which focused on the play’s premiere season; in an interview with Mark Macleod, he acknowledged that in the making of art, particularly the making of communal art like the theatre, which is supposed to be a humane activity, you may do some pretty inhumane things in order to achieve the work.16

The concern with meta-theatre is also evident in Enright’s play from 2001, A Poor Student. The Stage on Screen collection preserves two takes, shot in rehearsal, of a scene in which Tony Sheldon plays an ageing actor who passionately, vehemently and even cruelly berates and ridicules a younger actor for not caring enough about the role he is auditioning for, or about the theatre itself.17 Sheldon’s performance is powerfully aggressive and dangerous in these sequences as he attacks the younger man for his lack of commitment to art. This passionate concern for good theatre was part of Enright’s own commitment to the medium, especially in comparison with film: The theatre’s more fun, for me. There’s more pleasure in it. You’re closer to the actors and the director and the designers. It’s more playful. When it works it’s more magical. You can hear the heart beat.18

In an extended 1998 interview with Jenny Brockie, Enright suggested that the pleasure of theatre for him was connected with a perception since his childhood that playing roles was a common feature of human life: I was outwardly at least a very conformist kid and really tried to do the things I was supposed to do, but inside me there was always a notion that this was nonsense, that people’s real lives were actually on the inside, and it’s that disparity between what people present and what they are that is the thing that fundamentally fascinates me.19


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The place where he resolved this tension between outward show and inner reality was the theatre: I was always driven by a notion that there was another life somewhere out there […] and I never felt particularly at ease in the world that I found myself in. I didn’t understand that until I had my first experience of acting when I was thirteen, and the sensation was of coming home, of feeling completely at ease and relaxed.20

Enright’s knowledge of Australian theatre history and practice, developed out of close involvement with many of its most important participants over decades, allowed him to speak authoritatively about it onstage and off. Part of the fascination with Mongels at its first appearance was not just that it provoked intense gossip about the private lives of two well-known playwrights and their co-workers within the industry, but that it signalled a milestone for Australian theatre itself, demonstrating that its history was itself interesting and substantial enough to be the subject of an important play. This, combined with Enright’s typically reflective approach to his work, and his resulting concern for the ethics of theatre-making, gave him a privileged and responsible position as a kind of spokesperson on behalf of Australian theatre. An actor’s playwright Enright’s success as a playwright is associated with his widely varied experience as a director, translator, adaptor and teacher, but it is his experience as an actor which may have had the greatest impact on his success. His most successful plays provide great opportunities for actors. He said of his work as a playwright: I think most particularly about what draws the actors towards each other, what engages the characters. I think and I write as an actor. I think, what would keep me in this scene as an actor? And of course it’s the need to go closer to somebody, to draw something from them.21

There is an extended sequence in the collection, broadcast in 1981, featuring the original production of The Venetian Twins.22 The footage shows, among other things, the tiny, presentational thrust stage on which the production was performed, with footlights, musicians

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sitting visibly to one side of the stage, and the red curtain and simple backdrop behind the acting area. The footage demonstrates the physicality, the fun, the roughness, the vigour, the colour and the energy of the production. Shot in front of a live audience, it shows how well, in the original production, Enright’s dramatic situations and writing worked in performance. The dialogue of The Venetian Twins is deliberately corny with, for example, extended puns on the words “honour” and “offer”, and the two words “in” and “inn”. In performance, these gags were delivered with a self-aware bravado which made them work for the audience of the time. Interestingly, there is footage from a later revival in 1990 which shows a snippet of one of the same sequences recorded in the earlier footage.23 The lines seem less clever in the revival, partly because the footage was shot without a live audience, but partly because the first production was gifted with an almost ideal cast and director who understood the theatrical potential of the deliberately corny style. The most important thing about that production though is that it was a showcase for a single virtuoso comic performer, Drew Forsythe, who had the opportunity to play two different roles, the two twins who in this play never actually meet on stage. Unlike Shakespeare’s twin plays, both characters can be played by the same actor. The idea was developed by Enright working together with Nimrod Theatre director John Bell. There are stories that it was Enright who realised that this would be a good vehicle for Forsythe’s talents, and that he first suggested it to Bell as a project for the Nimrod. In an interview at the time of the first production, Forsythe explained how he set about playing the two physically identical but very different twins, one smart and the other stupid. Forsythe demonstrated how he clearly differentiated between the two, even though they wore exactly the same costume, similar to a matador’s outfit. The clever twin was given an urbane, ostentatious, showman-like quality, standing tall, looking confidently outward at other characters and speaking in a superior tone with a loud voice and upper-class English accent. The stupid twin was more of a confused and occasionally exasperated country bumpkin. He spoke more shyly in a distinctively Australian accent, his lower jaw pushed forward so that the sounds were slightly distorted, and with his eyes habitually downcast. The most distinctive feature which made the real difference between the two was the hat.


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The smart twin wore it the right way round, with the front pulled stylishly down low over his brows; the stupid twin wore it back-tofront, set awkwardly on the back of his head so that it pushed his ears forward. The difference was immediately obvious, and it allowed Forsythe to signal clearly to the audience which brother he was playing as soon as he entered the acting area.24 Conclusion Enright’s work as a playwright made an extremely important contribution to Australian theatre in the late twentieth century, and the materials in the Stage on Screen collection record not only the shape of his career but also some of the reasons for his success. They further indicate that his rise in terms of respect and status within the industry was not always unambiguously a good thing. In the case of this actors’ playwright, what was significant in his plays was not just the words printed on the page but the opportunities that his scripts afforded talented actors, designers and directors whose work has been recorded in the collection. Many people who work in the Australian theatre industry knew Nick Enright personally, and there are many more who saw and remember his plays in performance, but this will not always be the case. It will be important for future generations of theatre students and historians to have access to the records of those performances that survive. This chapter is an attempt to locate, describe and analyse some of that material. My hope is that the Stage on Screen collection, as a resource, will help commemorate, celebrate and explain the careers of not only Enright but other Australian theatre practitioners who have worked in the fifty years since television started recording their practice.

Acknowledgement I am grateful that research for this chapter was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number LP0218607). I am also grateful to the staff of the television archives of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, particularly to Mary-Jane Stannus and Sal Russo. Major thanks are also due to Jeremy Gadd, whose work contributed greatly to the location of material described in this chapter.

Notes NB: references with the prefix TARA or PN are to the ABC catalogues; those prefaced by SoS refer to the University of New England Stage on Screen catalogue.

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3

4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Nick Enright: An Actor’s Playwright See TARA338793; SoS397. The project located 3,635 surviving broadcasts of relevance to the history of Australian theatre. These items have been catalogued, copied onto VHS tape – over 600 cassettes – and are in the ongoing process of being analysed. The copied material is stored at the University of New England, and can be consulted there, but cannot be further copied without permission from the copyright holders. I am especially grateful for the work of the two researchers, Jeremy Gadd and Mary Walsh, who worked on the project. The collection includes material from Blackrock (3 items from two productions), The Boy from Oz (8 items), Cloudstreet (15 items from at least three productions), Good Works (1 item), The King Stag (1 item), A Man with Five Children (1 item), Mongrels (3 items from two productions), A Poor Student (1 item), The Venetian Twins (6 items from two productions). TARA486430; SoS502. See the review of Mongrels in the Sun-Herald, 17 November 1991, p. 121, which began, ‘With this play the multi-talented Nick Enright earns the right to be considered a serious playwright. His last play, Daylight Saving, was a hit, but like Donald MacDonald (Caravan) and Barry Creyton (Double Act) he might until now have been regarded as an actor who had written a commercially successful play.’ TARA310511; SoS301. TARA338793; SoS397. TARA38793; SoS397. PN135615; SoS431. TARA310511; SoS301. TARA310511; SoS301. TARA336279; SoS421. TARA336279; SoS 421. TARA285725; SoS459. TARA285725; SoS459. TARA301511; SoS301. TARA495953; SoS502. TARA285725; SoS459. TARA392992; SoS384. TARA392992; SoS384. TARA285725; SoS459. PN81/703; SoS235. TARA392992; SoS384. PN81/703; SoS235.

Reference Bollen, Jonathan, Adrian Kiernander and Bruce Parr. 2008. Men at Play: Masculinities in Australian Theatre since the 1950s, Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Chapter 8 Mongrels and Young Curs: The Hounding of the Feminine in St James Infirmary, Good Works, Blackrock and Spurboard Jane O’Sullivan Abstract This chapter focuses on selected plays by Nick Enright in its exploration of the manner in which their female characters and associated markers and modes of operation aligned with “the feminine” are largely deployed to give definition to hegemonic masculinity and the concerns and difficulties experienced by the young male protagonists as they move from boys to men. In essence it is argued that, following the example of Mongrels, in St James Infirmary, Good Works, Blackrock and Spurboard, the female characters largely function as aides in the recuperation of emotional expression for the men in their lives and that this role is performed at the expense of any satisfying exploration of the women’s individual concerns and complexities. It is therefore ironic that the extent of this silencing or erasure of the women is so evident as to demand attention.

Nick Enright has made a large and varied contribution to Australian theatre, most particularly in his creation and presentation of some unforgettably cruel and conflicted images of Australian manhood. These characters have been crafted with acuity and compassion, reflecting the playwright’s ongoing concerns about the crippling effects of hegemonic masculinity as enforced by the more masculine characters or agents of masculinity in the plays. The extent to which these enforcers impact on the lives of the other characters qualifies them for the title of “fabulous monster”, one whose image, when “offer[ed] to our gaze, constructs models of being-in-society that, on the one hand, invite us to desire and imitate those models which society and ideology approve, and on the other, warn us against other possibilities” (Buchbinder 1998: 3). The manner in which such models of hegemonic masculinity ensure that all traces of “the feminine” (those modes of action and expression associated with

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women in Australian culture) are excised from the young male characters – as they move towards acceptance by, or defeat within, the ranks of hegemonic masculinity – is clearly a major target of critique within the texts. However, while the plays appear to value a number of ostensibly feminine sensibilities and bemoan the eradication of those sensibilities in young men, the price paid by the plays’ focus on these youths is that of the absence of a satisfying treatment of the women in their lives. In effect, the excision of agency and prospect from the lives of the female characters appears to be of little interest in comparison to that of the excision of the gentler, less macho elements of the young male characters and the resulting diminishing of real agency and prospect – choice if you will – in their lives as men. In this chapter I focus on the female characters and the manner in which they and associated markers of the feminine have been deployed as devices in the narratives’ preoccupation with their young men. Essentially, the plays I have selected for attention use female characters and the feminine to give definition to the operations of masculinity and the process of moving from boys to men. Those characters, be they male or female, who are coded or received as feminine seem to me to be variously used and abused by two distinct but related means. The first means of use or abuse is that of the actions of the dominant male characters within the diegesis (or world of the play). The second is that of the extra-diegetic or textual processes by which these characters, in being used as devices in the definition of the main protagonists, have not been fully realised in the play-as-script. The primacy given to the concerns of masculinity renders the women as little more than seismographs, registering the force and impact of the angry and angst-ridden eruptions of the masculine landscape whose borders they inhabit. Yet, there is a certain irony in the manner in which the male characters’ intense, perhaps hysterical, preoccupation with the active eradication of the feminine combines with the play-texts’ erasure of the female characters in such a manner as to effect their restoration to the central consciousness of the text. In effect, their absence is so striking that it cannot be ignored. Despite the sexual and textual oppressions meted out to them, those elements of the feminine (embodied in the mothers, female lovers as well as those ostensibly transgressive or “lesser” men) continue to recuperate “feeling” as an acceptable emotional

Mongrels and Young Curs: The Hounding of the Feminine

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sphere for masculinity and for the young men in their lives. The plays’ agents of the feminine do, however, achieve this at great personal cost. Before turning to the plays that most explicitly focus on young men, including St James Infirmary which, as Bruce Parr (1998: 90) has noted, is concerned “to some marginal degree with homosexuality” and Good Works, which centres on gay men, I want to note a couple of ways in which Mongrels, in its treatment of the female characters and the feminine, enacts these two above-mentioned means of use and abuse and could be said to foreshadow similar treatment in the plays focused on in this chapter. In its portrayal of its rabid leading protagonist and “top dog” Edmund Burke, as he bludgeons his way from ex-con to celebrated playwright and on to desolation and death, Mongrels describes a trajectory littered with much-abused, mocked or insulted women and gay or cross-dressed men. As Veronica Kelly notes, in his confrontations with other men, Burke “tries the well-worn tactic of feminising the opposition” (1994: 17), and is reprimanded by one of his cast for “his not atypical New Wave gender blindness” (Kelly 1994: 8) for not providing adequate roles for women in his plays. The women in Burke’s life are always at risk of being damaged or dismissed entirely. His new wife and producer, Elaine, is decidedly damaged as, having been beaten by Burke, she sits with one arm bandaged and bruised ribs and describes him as “like some kind of wild animal” (61). Coupled with his earlier displays of misogyny, Burke is presented as a consummate “fabulous monster”. Yet, it seems that elements of this misogyny can be detected in the composition of the play itself. The concerns of the female characters are given insufficient time or space to allow them to appear as anything other than victims and their own circumstances and aspirations do not emerge with great clarity or achieve much significance. In a directorial meeting with Burke, Elaine implores him to modify his treatment of one of his female characters: “The character. You can’t hate her. Give her some justifications […] Give the woman a bit of dignity. See her side, that’s your job” (28). In my discussion of the playscripts that follow, supported by selected press reviews of their first productions, I explore the extent to which this job remains undone.

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St James Infirmary1 But if he had a woman close to him, someone he might trust and listen to […] (Father D’Arcy, 33)

Set within the confines of a Catholic boys’ boarding school, St James Infirmary is perfectly placed to present the clash of burgeoning identities and the formal and informal induction of young men into approved performances of masculinity. A major part of this process depends upon the boys living within the institutionalised homosocial world of the school and beyond maternal care. Indeed the care and nurture of these boys has been directed by their biological fathers into the hands of the priests. In the case of the leading young male protagonist, he has been so directed because his father killed his mother with a shotgun in the middle of the night. The school’s culture is one of cadets, cricket, rowing and a concentrated effort to achieve academic success, measured in terms of gaining admission to “the right”’ professions. The various ways in which young men might be positioned (or position themselves) in relation to the culture of the school is represented in the actions of three characters: most particularly the play’s focal “difficult young man”, Dominic Connolly, but also Brian Bowker, arch-conservative cricketer and cadet, and Tim Donohue, a young impressionable would-be theatrical impresario. Each of these latter two young men is smitten by Connolly, with Bowker seeing the anti-establishment deployment of Connolly’s artistic talents as a threat and Donohue celebrating it as a model of how best to live “expressively”. The aggressive suspicion with which Bowker – and the conventional masculinity he represents – views Donohue is apparent in his ridicule of Donohue’s having worn “a big pink dress with a fan” when playing the role of Lydia Languish (18). Observing the paint on Donohue’s hands, he continues to question the young actor’s masculinity and perhaps sexuality, by commenting, “I thought your kind liked to keep yourselves neat? There’s paint under your fingernails” (18). This is not Bowker’s only expression of quasi homophobia or of anxiety in the presence of a less-thanconventional embodiment of masculinity. Indeed, Bowker’s conflicted feelings are quite apparent when he tries to explain his disappointment that his friendship with Connolly has disintegrated but “recoils abruptly” when Connolly moves to comfort him. Later, Bowker reveals an awareness of the restrictions continued compliance with


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mainstream masculinity will impose on his capacity for selfexpression. After once again approaching and abandoning the subject of their past friendship, Bowker manages the following awkward expression of feeling: BOWKER: […] Promise me one thing. When you see me, years from now, come up to me. Don’t run away. Don’t be shut off. Because I will be. I know more about myself than you think. [Abruptly BOWKER envelops DOMINIC in a clumsy but powerful embrace. Just as abruptly he lets go and hurries out, leaving DOMINIC alone in the middle of the room.] (63)

This kind of institutionalised emotional repression or “toughening up” is reflected in the Spartan conditions and ideals of the boarding school as reflected in the following exchange between the new matron of the school infirmary, Jenny Walsh, and her assistant, Norma Lockwood: NORMA: Up there at the college, they have those long cold dormitories, stone walls and bare light-bulbs and not a decent bit of carpet or a pair of curtains to warm the place up, but they’ve got the school crest woven into the bedspreads. See? Some poor old nun went blind doing that, I’ll bet. A sword and a sparrow and a big motto. Semper Audax. JENNY: What does that mean? FATHER D’ARCY: Always bold. Always daring. (32–33)

Father D’Arcy, the Art teacher who sees Connolly as his protégé, desperately wants Connolly to successfully complete his time at the school and to go on to realise his considerable potential as an artist. Threatening to spoil this plan is Connolly’s recent rebellious act of painting anti-Vietnam War propaganda on the walls of the school dining room. D’Arcy attempts to conscript the new matron into assisting him in modifying Connolly’s behaviour and persuading him to tone down his criticism of those who are fighting in that arena. He has chosen Jenny as his ally in this endeavour because she is the young widow of a man recently killed whilst serving in the medical corps in Vietnam. In the following exchange, concerning the violence in Dominic’s depiction of a bomb exploding over a village in Vietnam and a woman with her skin burned off, holding a crying child, Jenny

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resists D’Arcy’s attempt to persuade her to assist in the young man’s transition to successful manhood: JENNY: I’m not in this. I’m not his mother. D’ARCY: He lost his mother when he was four. JENNY: I’m not going to be made responsible – D’ARCY: No-one ever said you would be. But if he had a woman close to him, someone he might trust and listen to …. I thought a woman like yourself, who’d witnessed things that Dominic’s only read about … JENNY: War, you mean? You can say the word. D’ARCY: I mean violence. There’s a strain of it emerging in him, in his work. He hates it in himself, and he turns that to a hatred of war, this war. And so he takes the side of the victim, like that woman on the wall. You saw it this morning, I hear. A gross simplification. You could show him that the real issues are complex. JENNY: You can’t use people like that, Father. (33)

Clearly, Jenny’s feelings about the war, along with her sense of loss, are deemed by D’Arcy to be insignificant relative to his own view of what is important for Connolly. I suggest that Jenny’s belief that people (herself in this instance) should not be used as a means to ends that serve only the interests of others, resonates with the characters’ feelings also identified in relation to the use or exploitation of women and women’s roles, in and by Mongrels. Whilst it can be said that in speaking up for herself and others in this manner, Jenny exerts a degree of agency, it is a brief moment of assertion and resistance after which she does perform the secondary role of the young man’s sounding board while her issues of grief and loss continue to be elided. The effect of this exclusive focus on the young male protagonist is also noted in some reviews of the play’s first season. Responses to the Q Theatre’s production of St James Infirmary were both positive and negative, but pertinent to my interests in the preoccupation with the lives of the young men over those of women is Ken Healey’s concern with why this play “narrowly fails to make an indelible mark”. Healey goes on to suggest that “it is because the play is too emotionally safe and predictable in its concentration on Dominic, who is too idealised to be a satisfactory protagonist” (1992: 13). Similarly, Bob Evans’ enthusiasm for the play is qualified and he observes that, “at times the cast could take characters to greater extremes, particularly the Matron and Connolly (1992: 13). What is


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the Matron’s response to her husband’s death and how could it modify her responses to Connolly?” I think that in the playscript, such a shift of focus away from the specific journey of the central male, Dominic, could have allowed for a more satisfying exploration of the woman herself. As it is, one can only speculate about her situation, prompted by the play’s silence on this matter. Good Works2 “Bring him down to earth, Brother. Make him one of us, Brother, that’s your job.” (Brother Clement quoting Neil Donovan, 44)

The play begins in the year 1981 with two men in a gay bar playing a sort of movie quiz. One of the men, Tim, produces a snow-dome he’s just picked up from a second-hand shop and is explaining why he bought it: TIM: It’s a childhood thing. It reminded me of … ALAN: No personal slush. We’re only interested in the collective memory. (1)

Alan’s response here introduces the notion of there being rules that regulate appropriate behaviours which, even in this exchange between members of the often feminised gay identity group, underline (satirically, perhaps) the widely practised masculine outlawing of expressions of personal emotion. When Alan notices that Tim is being watched by a new arrival at the bar, banter ensues in which the two of them characterise the “types” of men whose external life is the embodiment of mainstream masculinity but whose internal life (psychological or emotional) is same-sex oriented and keeps them in a constant state of anxious denial. Interwoven with the clichés or stereotypes invoked in the scene there is an appreciation of the men’s need for emotional expression or “tenderness” as well as “raunch” (2–3). As it happens, this mystery man is Shane, one of the two central protagonists and Tim’s long-lost first best friend (and childhood sweetheart). Through a series of moves between the past and present, the play traces the development and course of that early relationship and the means by which the boys were eventually torn apart from one another. In essence, their mothers had been childhood friends who had grown up in a small town, had lived very different

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lives with quite different kinds of men and finally found themselves competing for the right to raise Shane as their son. Shane’s mother, Rita, could be characterised as having taken up with a series of nohopers and Shane as having missed out on having a father. The other woman, Mary Margaret, has married a successful man and, perhaps because of her own experience as an orphan, desperately tries to convince Rita to give up Shane, allowing him to be raised in a more stable environment alongside Mary Margaret’s own son, Tim. Tim and Shane first meet in primary school where Tim is already the subject of mockery and intimidation by the teacher, Brother Clement. Clement introduces Tim as having a “weak chest” and as “a martyr to bronchitis” but “very musical” (6) and taunts him for being afraid of diving from the diving board (12). Shane immediately slips into the role of Tim’s protector; after all, he’s had plenty of experience of bullying masculinity at the hands of his mother’s male friends. Indeed, it is an act of retribution, killing Brother Clement for having taken the strap to Tim, that ends the boys’ relationship and sees Shane sent to prison. Significantly, it is Tim’s own father, Neil Donovan, who arranges for Brother Clement to punish Tim and bring him into line with mainstream notions of what it is to be a man. Expressing his disapproval and shame about Tim’s “inadequate” performance of youthful masculinity, he reacts to the news that his son will be playing a girl in the school play: NEIL: … You know they think he’s a freak? … He doesn’t mix. He doesn’t join in. He can’t dive. He can’t kick a ball. He can’t stay vertical on a bike … And sick half the year with chest complaints … I won’t have him pooncing around the Town Hall stage in a dress. (22)

Neil Donovan is a powerful man in the community and takes his complaint directly to the Bishop, as a result of which Brother Clement is instructed to apologise for having cast Tim in the said female role. Predictably, Clement is keen to take this out on Tim. Surprisingly, Tim’s own father facilitates this revenge. Having described his son as “a creature from another planet” who speaks his “own language”, Neil instructs Clement to “Bring him down to earth, Brother. Make him one of us, Brother, that’s your job” (44). Clearly, Tim’s queering of conventional Catholic youth is abhorrent to Neil Donovan and Brother Clement and the notion of speaking in a different language is received


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as weird rather than recognised as a means of giving voice to thoughts and feelings not catered for in phallogocentic discourse. This bid for a speaking position is reminiscent of the French feminist notion of écriture feminine, or feminine writing, by which means women might strive for a subject position. This linguistic marker of Tim’s marginalisation is made more explicitly a feminising process by Clement, when he continues, “Your brothers had the makings of leaders. You, Donovan, you’re the makings of a rag doll.” Taking a stand against Clement’s attempts to belittle him, Tim successfully undercuts Clement’s verbal abuse, proving to be the superior wordsmith: BR CLEMENT: There’s not a bit of sinew in you. Why are you smiling Donovan? TIM: Sinew in you. You made a rhyme. (44)

At this point, Clement falls back on tactics more typical of his role as a henchman of the hegemony: BR CLEMENT: I made a rhyme. I’ll give you a rhyme. A good one. Strop. And Hop. I strop. You hop. This’ll sharpen you up. Hop. [He catches TIM across the legs] (44–45)

Angela Bennie describes Good Works as “a memory play” that traces a “journey through its protagonist Tim’s memory as he searches desperately for understanding about who he is and why he is as he is” (1994: 43–44). In my reading of the published script of Good Works, Rita and Mary Margaret emerge as much-put-upon women whose main challenge in life and role in this play is to strive for the love and protection of a man and – be it in the presence or absence of that man – to retain the right to a role in the raising of a son. The complex ‘push-and-pull’ of mother–son relationships is also apparent in the explorations of family interactions with young masculinities in two more recent Enright plays, each arguably targeted at a young audience, Blackrock and Spurboard.

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Blackrock3 Because I lost you that night, didn’t I? That's like losing a part of myself. (Diane Kerby, 67)

and Spurboard4 Show you can go the distance, fella, you’ll stand tall and walk proud, stand proud and walk tall. (Gil, 6)

Blackrock and Spurboard explore the risks and uncertainties, decisions and family relationships that impact on the lives of young people. Both plays originated as Theatre-in-Education pieces. Blackrock began its life as the Theatre-in-Education production, A Property of the Clan. Spurboard, as Enright explains in the ‘Playwright’s Note’ in the Currency Press edition of the play, “was commissioned by Australian Theatre for Young People with funds from the Australia Council” (2001: xii), and, like A Property of the Clan, was devised with the co-operation and collaboration of various adults and young people from the local community. It is in Blackrock that the spurning of the feminine with which I am centrally concerned in this chapter is made most explicit. Here I build on an earlier argument made by a colleague and myself (Holland and O’Sullivan 1999) about the erasure or sacrificial exploitation of women in the film Blackrock. There we argue that the treatment of the women in and by that film was one of the many disturbing aspects of its portrayal of some young men’s enactments of mainstream Australian masculinity. But in this chapter I take this further, turning to the playscript of Blackrock, and the manner in which its depiction of the young men’s mistreatment of women is exacerbated by the play’s near erasure or misuse of these women as narrative or figurative aids to the explication of young masculine angst. In essence, the play Blackrock focuses on the emotional and psychological after-effects experienced by a group of young men who in one sense or another contributed to the pack rape and subsequent murder of a young girl, Tracy. The nature of the life Tracy lived, hoped for and lost is largely left out of the picture. Rather she is deployed as an instance and device in the exploration of the young


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men. This is especially disturbing given that this play is so transparently based on the actual rape and murder of Leigh Leigh in November 1989.5 The film and stage production have been chastised for their negligent, or merely cursory, treatment of the female characters. As Anne Pender notes in her overview of the work of Nick Enright, Helen Garner has also “expressed her dissatisfaction with the play and the movie version of Blackrock for their failure to imagine the girl characters as individuals, while the boys are given an attentiveness and an ‘angry pity’” (2006: 87). The play’s focus on its young men is also reflected in the reviews of the play’s first production and its inadequate treatment of its women is quite widely noted and condemned. Julietta Jameson bemoans the fact that just as Leigh Leigh “has become a symbol of the horrifying heart of darkness that lurks inside the notion of white Anglo-Saxon Australian mateship and the misogyny and violence that rears out of it” (1995: 12), so too in Blackrock, “Enright objectifies Tracy, leaving the audience without an emotional attachment to the character and free to grapple only with the consequences”. In a criticism of the play that resonates strongly with that earlier plea in Mongrels that female characters be further developed, given “a bit of dignity”, Frank Gauntlett comments that “Both Kym Wilson and Angela Punch McGregor seem to be desperately seeking substance for their characters, and not finding it” (1995: 13) and Ken Longworth, whilst acknowledging “good performances” from three female members of the cast, adds that “director David Berthold’s depiction of some of the women leaves a lot to be desired” (1995: 13). To be fair, Longworth should also allow for the possibility that if, as he suggests, all of the “adult characters” in the performance were “caricatures” or “crudely drawn”, then it may be the script, not just the direction, that he found wanting. Perhaps the most troubling misuse or abusive deployment of a woman in Blackrock lies in the depiction of breast cancer in Diane, the mother of Jared, the play’s central “conflicted young man”. In a discussion of her treatment in the film, it has been argued that: […] as the film intermittently touches upon the progress of her fear and pain, there is a sense that her silent suffering is being paralleled to that of her son – a disturbing comparison given that he chose silence and his anguish is the result of the suffering he allowed Tracy to endure. (Holland and O’Sullivan 1999: 83)

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I am still at a loss for an explanation for the playwright’s decision to encumber Diane with a diagnosis of breast cancer that the character did not have in the play’s earlier and arguably more successful manifestation as A Property of the Clan. I can only receive this and her subsequent mastectomy as a rather cruel device allowing for the highly questionable paralleling of her pain and loss with that experienced at losing her son, and with that experienced by her son, because of his loss of innocence resulting from his failure to intervene in the rape and resulting murder of Tracy. This figurative deployment of the woman’s suffering is evident when Diane says goodbye to her son Jared as he prepares to leave town: DIANE: Would you write me a letter, one day? Tell me what happened to you? Because I lost you that night [of Tracy’s death]. That’s like losing a part of myself. I know what that’s like now. Jared … Give us your hand. [He offers his hand. She raises it to her right breast, then her left.] (67)

Similar disquiet about this narrative development in the re-working of A Property of the Clan is expressed in Frank Gauntlett’s (1995: 12) review of Blackrock: The sudden breast cancer thrust upon Punch McGregor seems little more than an unnecessary labouring of the relentlessly awful lot these women endure, and cause for her self-obsessed son Jared to mar the potential for redemption he might otherwise represent.

Certainly, this young protagonist’s failure to respond to his mother’s earlier approaches about her condition, along with his ongoing preoccupation with his own circumstances, disappoints. But, it should not surprise, given the extent to which he has been moulded by the prescriptive and proscriptive regulations of his male peers. Any articulation of ostensibly feminine sentiment is quickly quashed, as seen in an earlier exchange between Jared and the newly returned “monstrous” hegemonic male, Ricko, who later murders Tracy: JARED: […] I’m glad you’re back, mate. I’ve missed you. RICKO: What are you, a queer dog? JARED: Get fucked. RICKO: Suss-dog.


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[JARED smacks him around the head. They go off together, sparring, laughing.] (7)

In Spurboard, this ridicule and eradication of any physical or verbal expression of sentiment by men informs the suspicion and devaluing of other similarly feminised modes of operation, such as given expression in Greg, the studious and sensitive star-gazing character set in opposition to his brawny, bull-riding brother, Mitchell. These two, the Kellaway brothers, are in direct competition with each other throughout the play and initially embody polar and contesting masculinities. When Mitchell feigns interest in Greg’s knowledge of the stars, but only with a view to mocking him behind his back, Greg dismisses him as “dumb”, to which Mitchell replies “Yeah. I’m a dumb shit. But I’m not a gutless turd” (34) and squares up for a fight. Spurboard is set in rural Australia and touches upon a range of issues impacting on the lives of rural teenagers, including grappling with their future ambitions, sexuality and their parents’ expectations about their commitment to staying on the family farm until it experiences “better times”. Whilst, as Bryce Hallett (1999, online) notes in his review, “Enright has created several solid characters and stock country matrons”, and that “[m]uch of the action centres on the two rival brothers”, it must be said that Spurboard does give consideration to the problems and ambitions of two young female friends of the Kellaway boys. One of the girls, Amy, is sufficiently trapped in a small town culture to have to find satisfaction and vicarious thrills through her role as Mitchell’s girlfriend, whilst the other girl, Karen, evades Greg’s rather half-hearted advances and moves to a career in the police force and a realisation of her lesbian identity. In this respect, the concerns of the young women are not erased by the narrative structures of the play itself. Nevertheless, it is the lives of the young men that are the principal focus of attention and, in Amy’s case, her only sense of control over events is shown to lie in her ability to arouse the interest of young men. Discussing Mitchell with her friend Karen, Amy says, “The first time I kissed him, I mean, full-on … I thought he had something stuck down his pants … I was, like, wow. I have this power” (18). As it happens, Amy’s power is dependent upon throwing in her lot with one or other of the two brothers.

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In the contest between these two brothers it rapidly becomes apparent that Mitchell’s performance of hegemonic masculinity wins out over that of Greg and is subsequently affirmed as the one a young man should strive to emulate. Reflecting this understanding, Greg quickly abandons his own mode of operation and adopts those of his older brother and works towards competing with Mitchell within Mitchell’s chosen milieu – head-to-head on the rodeo circuit. Of course, the circuit is iconically masculine, as affirmed in the tonguein-cheek clichés uttered by the character of Gil, a kind of spectre who mediates between the external and internal worlds of the young protagonists. Mitchell has already developed a taste for the rodeo but it is Gil who feeds his ambition to be “Up there with the big fellas” (24) and encourages him to “Show you can go the distance, fella, you’ll stand tall and walk proud, stand proud and walk tall” (6). Subscribing to the ideals expressed by Gil, both Mitchell and Greg become hooked on the circuit despite, or perhaps because of, the dire risks associated with bronco riding. When Mitchell has a disastrous fall in the rodeo ring and is rendered a paraplegic, Greg could be said to have beaten Mitchell at his own game – not by defeating him, but by outlasting (or outlucking) him. Greg moves into Mitchell’s place as rodeo star and Amy’s lover. This most explicitly makes Amy a site of contestation, serving as the prize in a hegemonic struggle that both facilitates such contests of hegemonic power and confirms them. In this respect Amy serves a similar function to Elaine, whose friendship and assistance served as the contested ground between Burke and O’Hara in Mongrels. Because of O’Hara’s homosexuality, as distinct from Burke’s bi-sexuality, Elaine is not a sexual prize. It could, however, be argued that competing for women, in its diminishing or devaluing of women as individual subjects, is in effect a non-criminal and less overtly violent version of the competitive performance of sexual dominance over a woman in the case of rape, such as depicted in the gang of mates raping and subsequently keeping silent over the death of Tracy in Blackrock. At another remove, yet predicated on a similar misogynistic objectification of the woman, there is competitive conquest of women as a form of marking of territory, which in Spurboard is quite explicitly identified when Karen expresses her disapproval of Greg and Amy’s secret sexual arrangement:


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KAREN: [To Greg] … I know you and Mitchell. You just want to … GREG: What? KAREN: Nothing. GREG: Say it. Fucken say it. AMY: I will. You just want to go everywhere Mitchell’s been. [To KAREN] Was that it? KAREN: Pretty much. I’m sorry. AMY: But it’s true. (96–97)

It would seem that Amy is not even the prize here. Rather, she’s the common stomping ground or a rite-of-passage in the brothers’ journey up to where “the big fellas” are. Predictably, she does her duty by staying with Mitchell and fulfilling her caring or nurturing secondary role. This secondary or largely functional role is common to the women in these plays and their significance seems limited to that of a mitigating influence in the lives of their men. The overwhelming message seems to be that the influence of women and the instilling or nurturing of the feminine in young men is essential in the struggle to keep in check the more “monstrous” manifestations of hegemonic power. Yet, the sins of commission (offences against the women) that are depicted within the plays, exacerbated by the sins of omission (of the complexity and individual concerns of the female characters) by the plays, become too pronounced to go unnoticed. As a result, the women are repositioned as central to the plays as well as central to well-being, and the feminine heart of the text is recuperated for the female in an act of sexual and textual reckoning.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Premiered, Q Theatre, Penrith, 14 February 1992. Premiered, Q Theatre, Penrith, 29 July 1994. Premiered, Wharf 1, Sydney, 30 August 1995. Australian Theatre for Young People in Association with the Sydney Theatre Company, Premiered Wharf 2, 4 November 1999. For an academic criminologist’s analysis of factors contributing to the rape, murder and criminal investigation into this case, see Kerry Carrington’s (1998) Who Killed Leigh Leigh?: A Story of Shame and Mateship in an Australian Town.

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Cited works Bennie, Angela. 1994. Review of Good Works in The Sydney Morning Herald (1 August 1994) in Australian and New Zealand Theatre Record (ANZTR) VIII(7) (July 1994): 43–44. Buchbinder, D. 1998. Performance Anxieties: Re-Producing Masculinity. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Carrington, K. 1998. Who Killed Leigh Leigh? A Story of Shame and Mateship in an Australian Town. Sydney: Random House. Enright, N. 1993. St James Infirmary. Sydney: Currency Press. —— 1994. Mongrels. Sydney: Currency Press. —— 1995. Good Works. Currency Theatre Series, Currency Press, Sydney, in Association with Playbox Theatre, Monash University, Melbourne. —— 1996. Blackrock. Sydney: Currency Press. —— 2001. Spurboard. Sydney: Currency Press. Evans, Bob. 1992. Review of St James Infirmary in The Sydney Morning Herald (17 February 1992) in ANZTR VI(2) (February 1992): 13. Fitzgerald, Michael. 1995. Review of Blackrock in Time Australia (25 September 1995) in ANZTR IX(9) (September 1995): 61–62. Garner, H. 1997. ‘An Outbreak of Acting’ in The Australian’s Review of Books (14 May 1997): B27. Gauntlett, Frank. 1995. Review of Blackrock in Sunday Telegraph (3 September 1995) in ANZTR IX(8) (August 1995): 12–13. Hallett, Bryce. 1999. Review of Spurboard, in The Sydney Morning Herald (15 November 1999). On line at: smhh000020010829dvbf00spi http://global. factiva.com.ezproxy.une.edu.au/ha/default.aspx Healey, Ken. 1992. Review of St James Infirmary in the Sun-Herald (1 March 1992) in ANZTR VI(2) February 1992: 12–13. Holland, F. and J. O’Sullivan. 1999. ‘“Lethal Larrikins”: Cinematic Subversions of Mythical Masculinities in Blackrock and The Boys’, Antipodes 13(2): 79–84. Jameson, Julietta. 1995. Review of Blackrock in Telegraph Mirror (1 September 1995) in ANZTR IX(8) (August 1995): 12. Kelly, V. 1994. ‘Enright’s Mongrels as Intervention in the Canon of Contemporary Australian Drama’, Southerly 54(2): 5–22. Longworth, Ken. 1995. Review of Blackrock in Newcastle Herald (7 September 1995) in ANZTR IX(8) (August 1995): 13. Parr, B. 1998. ‘From Gay and Lesbian to Queer Theatre’ in Kelly, Veronica (ed.) Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s, Australian Playwrights series. Amsterdam: Rodopi: 89–103. Pender, A. 2006. ‘Nick Enright’ in Selina Samuels (ed.) Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 325: Australian Writers 1975–2000. Detroit: Thomson Gale: 82–87.

Chapter 9 Anxiety and a Fragmented Australia in Nick Enright’s A Man With Five Children Felicity Plunkett Abstract Nick Enright’s A Man With Five Children measures and illuminates an anatomy of anxiety, as it scrutinises a complex set of ethical issues about privacy and responsibility, primarily in the context of documentary film-making. The question of paternity suggested in the title relates to the pseudo-parental role the play’s protagonist, documentary-maker Gerard Hilferty, both adopts and abnegates in relation to the five child subjects of his film. It also captures something of the political climate of the Australia Enright depicts, which Gerry seeks to capture, gesturing towards a politics where questions of exclusion, acceptance and national identity were crucial. Connecting these concerns is an overarching set of questions about hospitality. Enright’s play examines the question of who might host whom, and the various ways in which the lives of its characters might come to accommodate those of one another, and to be shaped by those whom they host. It is a play permeated with a sense of both loss and the generosities that provide a salve for that loss, and it is a play that returns to worry the ethical issues at its heart.

Despite the title’s suggestions of intimacy, abundance and the paternal, Nick Enright’s A Man With Five Children centres on losses and anxieties, focusing precisely on those its title evokes, and exploring their literal and figurative aspects. The play measures and illuminates an anatomy of anxiety in its personal and political aspects, and charts the ways in which its characters might find recuperation amidst these. One part of this recuperative process occurs through intimacy, and the play’s crucial concern with hospitality reflects this. Enright’s play examines the question of who might host whom, and the various ways in which the lives of its characters might come to accommodate those of one another, and to be shaped by those whom they host. At the surface of the play is an examination of the processes of capturing or recording a life in the context of documentary filmmaking, and ideas about what shapes that life. This examination

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stretches to take in – in covert glimpses and almost-occluded hints – the ways these questions about shaping lives might operate at a political level. It is a play permeated with a sense of both loss and the generosities that provide a salve for that loss, and it is a play that returns to worry the ethical issues at its heart. A reference to hospitality is the first movement of Enright’s play, producing its first words, an invitation by the play’s protagonist, director Gerard Hilferty, to the parents of Australia, to allow their children to appear in a documentary series he plans. Despite the energy and enthusiasm of this generous opening speech, in which he promises a record of “five children to speak for young Australia” (Enright 2003: 1), the films that emerge at the heart of Enright’s play evoke disappointment and resentment in their subjects, and, in some ways, ultimately, in their maker. And although Gerry might intervene when the children express racist or xenophobic views (“Hey! I don’t want name-calling. Never again. You’re all different. You’re all Australians. I want you all to respect one another” Enright 2003: 3). There is a sense in the play of the nascent neo-Fascism towards cultural difference that began to emerge in politics overtly, in new ways, towards the end of the century in Australia, in the period the play charts. Melded with this is a set of anxieties about the invasiveness of the project itself, and about privacy, openness and violation. Gerry seeks in the children a composite portrait of Australia from 1972 to 2000, and in following him as he pursues this goal, the play finds an Australia in a liminal moment, edging towards an eruption of violence, niggled by increasing xenophobia and insularity. Enright’s play scrutinises the ways in which violation operates at personal and political levels. In response to this, there are two key strands of anxiety expressed throughout the play, and these are entwined from the start. On the one hand, anxieties about the process of capturing a life are apparent, expressed in a series of questions the child subjects ask Gerry as the project begins. As one of the children, Roger Chan, puts it: “You talk to us. Then you do it again next year. And you’ll put the films together and see how we’ve changed … But why?” (Enright 2003: 1). The children are initially cautious, and their first forays into revealing themselves for the camera are halting and shy. Gerry’s own responses are truncated and minimal, and this aspect remains constant throughout the play, as Enright dramatises the ways

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in which Gerry seeks to remain aloof from his subjects. Gerry’s comment that “You never see me. I never narrate. I never comment” (68) suggests a disingenuousness about his own role, and an abnegation of responsibility for the shaping of his subjects’ lives, as well as his tendency to seek a detachment that is inevitably impossible. Gerry’s belief that he can find refuge behind the lens is repeatedly unsettled by the demands of his subjects’ lives, and by the complexity of the ethical issues that emerge as the filming progresses. As one of his subjects, the young Indigenous Jessie, observes: “One day someone’ll sneak up on you, Gerry. And you won’t know where to look” (7). As the play progresses, and the children grow up, their questions and anxieties intensify, and the language and terms in which they are evoked expands and grows more complex. This culminates in the recriminatory discussions that take place after Jessie’s death, when her partner Theo accuses Gerry of having stolen her death both by recording it, and by thus refusing to be there more simply as himself: “[Y]ou took her last moment. You took her death from me. And you took it from yourself. You could have been there” (77). The theme of theft is one to which Jessie has adverted earlier, when she emphasises the wounds associated with the legacy of the Stolen Generation, so the comments echo to suggest the political dimensions of theft, on which Jessie’s activism has centred. When Roger’s initial words are repeated shortly after this by the remaining subjects at the end of the play, in an effect that seems almost choral, the question’s resonance – and its endurance – is powerful. The play ends simply with the words: “But why?” (78). On the other hand, anxiety reverberates, at the broader level of the play, in its references to the Australia in which it is set. The first interviews with the children immediately touch on questions of racism, xenophobia and the question of the composition of Australia, and whom it should welcome. Jessie becomes the play’s focal point for questions about reconciliation and Australia’s Indigenous people. She emerges from an early determination not to speak for “young black Australia”, and stressing that “I’m just Jessie” (8), through a determined and evasive teenage hedonism “Music, dancing, eating, a bit of study, letting life happen. I like my life, you know?” (29) to an increasing activism that comes to be crucial to her life. The play ends in 2000, on the brink of the events of 2001 – the terrorist attacks in the

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United States on 11 September and the heightening of xenophobia after that. Enright focuses on a time of stalled reconciliation, and an increasing expression of racism, and the course of the children’s lives, especially Jessie’s life, map this eruption. As Jessie begins to find it important to express her identity through political activism, she rages against the narrowing of Australia that she feels, especially at the time of the Bicentennial celebrations in 1988, which, for her, symbolises a politics of complacency she needs to resist. It is in her fight for justice and reconciliation that Gerry finds “the fire inside you” (48), something he comes to love in her, and it is through this passionate activism that she and Theo build their love. This is the landscape in which Enright positions the later sections of his play and the landscape into which his five children – his five figurative shards of Australian society – grow: in terms of the play’s poetics, this is what they become, and create. In its study of xenophobia, the play centres on the covert as well as overt violences that attend and express anxiety, and that were to become central political concerns of the time he depicts. This theme of violence and anxiety recurs in Enright’s work, perhaps most obviously in his extensive work on the project that eventually produced Blackrock, originally a Theatre-in-Education project, A Property of the Clan, working with school students after the sexual assault and murder of fourteen-year-old Newcastle schoolgirl Leigh Leigh. That plays deals with complex issues of complicity and collusion, ideas whose more subtle and subliminal aspects appear again in A Man With Five Children. At the heart of a concern with violence is the question about hospitality: in what ways, and on what terms, can and should one person allow another’s entry to his or her life? Enright is interested in hospitality in its fullest sense, as brilliantly evoked by J. Hillis Miller, in his statement that “There is no parasite without its host” (Miller 1979: 221). Miller imagines in hospitality a vital, reciprocal set of transactions, and these are the sorts of reciprocities Enright explores as Gerry makes himself host to the children, but may also be seen as parasitical. He welcomes them as parasites within his own professional hosting of their lives; inhabits their lives in ways that are both enriching and invasive; relies on them for his work, but comes to be relied upon, too, in numerous ways by his subjects. Much of this is troubled. Gerry stumbles, for example, to understand his love for Jessie, misinterprets the feelings Susannah has


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for him, is unable to console an orphaned Cam, later sleeps with Cam’s wife, Annie, and eventually seems incapable of embracing any of the events of the subjects’ lives except from behind his camera. When Theo becomes central in Jessie’s life, thus ending Gerry’s dream of being with her, it is as though Gerry simply cannot comprehend this: his only response is to invite Theo to become part of the series – to become his sixth child. This gesture towards Theo exemplifies the way Gerry seeks to acquire that which he seems unable to relate to otherwise, and the ways in which his children quickly outgrow him in terms of their emotional lives. Gerry’s project is marked by a repeated retreat from his subjects, creating increasing alienation in them, and tension in his own sense of the project, which, towards the end, he discusses manically with Annie, saying: “I will finish it. They want it to go to air on the first of January 2000. And I will deliver. Somehow” (70). Even as it appears poised to dissolve, Gerry resists understanding the ways in which his project might have failed, and failed to accommodate his subjects. In another more literal sense, the children express issues of hospitality. In the first part of the play Enright has the children using the lexicon of debates about immigration and reconciliation, dramatising a grammar of Australian attitudes of the time. The language of these seven-year-old children is the spare and often ventriloquistic language of early childhood, a collage of bits and pieces garnered from the larger social and political world they are beginning to be aware of. As the children gather for the first shoot, they regard each other with caution and even hostility. One child, Cam, calls another, Jessie, an “abo”, and continues: “I hate abos” and glosses this with the particularly un-child-like: “Australians for Australia” and finally: “Bloody abo boong”, before he turns to Roger with: “Slope-features” (2–3). Each of the children in some way begins by defending his or her identity in the face of others’ scrutiny, whether overtly as Cam does, or covertly, such as the more educated Susannah’s curious and disparaging remarks about Zoe: “She won’t even say her name. Are all these children seven? She seems quite young for seven. I’m seven. I’m tall for my age” (2). The children – like the children in Michael Apted’s Up series (begun in 1963), which inspired Enright’s play – are conscious of the ways in which the culture places them, and the ways in which they feel welcome or hospitable. They begin to make friends with one another, and soon a strong collegiality is formed, a

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manufactured fraternity that springs from Gerry’s manufactured paternity. The pared speech of the children’s early exchanges with Gerry, at this stage, also effectively brings to the scene a sense of multifarious fragments, and the children begin to establish themselves as and through being subjects. The effect is like that of a collective found poem: their ideas are contained in glimpses and echoes that combine to create a sense of “young Australia”. These entwined preoccupations – the notion of a portrait of Australia, and the idea of the illusory nature of pure artistic objectivity – combine to create a focus in the play on a set of allegorical relationships whereby director and subjects in the documentary represent aspects of broader power relationships, and politics is played out within intimate, professional and national spheres. Enright’s fractured portrait of Australia evokes, too, a portrait of a fractured – or fracturing – Australia. If the Australian children work as a figurative collective the offspring of a contemporary Australia – the “five children to speak for young Australia” (1) – Gerry is, by extension of the analogy, a certain type of father, and fatherhood becomes the effaced term the play’s title and content comes to focus on, exploring the contours of Gerry’s figurative paternity. And although at times Gerry places himself in loco parentis, his various abnegations of this role suggest, in terms of the play’s allegory, the limitations and dangers of paternalism, whilst also evoking an almost mournful theme of the longing for children. Yet Gerry insists on his inability to be a parent. Early on, for instance, when Cam’s mother dies, and he asks Gerry: “Why can’t I live with you?” Gerry’s response is evasive and inadequate: “Hey. I’m really flattered.” At the end of the scene, Gerry eventually offers: “I’ll take you to the footie again next season” (6). Gerry’s ambivalent response to the children’s needs, and his refrain that begins with the early statement: “I can’t give you anything” (3) lends melancholy to the complex evocation of feelings with which the play opens, with its sinisterly acquisitive: “I want your child, and yours, and yours”, later repeated in its grammatically whittled form: “I want your child, yours, yours, yours, yours”, which marks the process of his selection. This is particularly evident in Gerry’s misprision when it comes to his sexual and romantic dealings with the young women whose lives he is filming, once they reach adulthood: his acquisitiveness outweighs his acceptance of responsibility.


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There is an interesting glimpse of this set of questions about power and responsibility when, within his opening speech, Gerry shifts from referring to himself in the first person, into a bombastic third: “You’ve all seen some of my films. Now you know the way Gerald Hilferty works” (1). Gerry’s third-person self embodies confidence and certainty in a way his first-person self does not, yet the shift also contains questions of responsibility, and a movement away from a first-person ownership of power: the question opens immediately about what Gerry does and doesn’t take responsibility for in for his actions, and his works. One thing Gerry never does, quite, in the play, is to apologise to his subjects, when they express their sense of being wronged. Apology, too, then, is an effaced term within the play, something that aptly reflects the Australian political context within which Gerry’s microcosmic paternalism operates. As Jessie grows, and considers her place as a young Indigenous woman, she engages with this subject, often in the context of her relationship with Greek Theo, and most importantly on Australia Day 1988, when she marches in protest at the celebrations’ occlusion of Indigenous history, and Theo jokes affectionately that her hope is for “total enlightenment, a national apology, proper land rights legislation” (38). The play immediately hints at the ambivalent aspects of Gerry’s motives. The acquisitive underpinnings of his goals are suggested in his initial speech. The stark threat contained in the stark wording of the opening line: “I want your child, and yours and yours” (1) is immediately glossed with Gerry’s casual and disingenuous claims that he only wants “the camera to follow them. To a football game, a ballet class, a birthday party” (1) – a claim that again removes his own agency since the camera, not Gerry, enacts the pursuit. Gerry tells the children: “I can’t give you anything”, though he adds: “But maybe we can do something together” (3). Unlike the Jesuits, by whom Enright was himself educated (Marr 2003) and who claimed, as Gerry loosely quotes: “Give me a child at seven, I’ll show you the adult”, he has less certain objectives: “I say, give me a child at seven and let’s see where he goes, where she goes” (1). His “five children to speak for young Australia” (a phrase later parodied by Theo who describes them as “five children to keep you happy” (39)) appear, as though from a dream, after this invitation to “meet at the gates of the zoo” (1). Meeting at the gates of the zoo is a nod in the direction of the key intertext to which A Man With Five

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Children plays host. In 1963, with cinéma vérité developing in France, a research assistant at British Granada Television, Michael Apted, embarked upon a project for its World in Action production team, a one-off film interviewing a group of seven-year-old English children from a range of backgrounds. Apted then proposed that a follow-up programme be made, and took over as its director, going on to create new instalments every seven years, the first called 7 Plus Seven, thereafter 21 Up and so on, until, most recently 49 Up (2005). Apted’s series has provided a model for the burgeoning documentary and reality television genres and has received extraordinary accolades, most famously critic Roger Ebert’s description of it as “an inspired, almost noble, use of the film medium” (Ebert 1998). In the first programme in Apted’s series, the children gather at the London Zoo, where the contrasts between them, in terms of class and privilege, immediately galvanise the drama. The setting also draws attention – wittingly or otherwise – to some of the ethical dilemmas at the project’s heart, and the ways in which characters’ lives might be captured, or, more problematically, caught. Enright makes a more overtly poetic use of a similar setting. His characters’ initial meeting at the zoo is explicitly evoked, years later, by the most articulate of his subjects, Susannah, who, on her graduation with a medical degree, provides the parodic voice-over commentary: “Another visit to the zoo. Today we feed the baby doctors” (43). Apted, significantly in terms of this motif of capturing the children, effaces himself throughout his series, and we hear less and less of his voice and fewer sweeping statements, an acknowledgment of the ways in which the series resists closure. Much of this is true of Gerry, who evades his own camera in similar ways. This evasion becomes one key focus of Enright’s work, and the play enables him to consider Gerry’s motivation and confusion. Susannah’s allusion to the zoo confronts Gerry in a sidelong manner, expressing and veiling her own vulnerability – her sense of being an entertainment, a curiosity, a zoo animal. Another of the subjects, Roger, challenges Gerry directly in a similar way, expressing his sense of being exploited, of being “sick of being a national joke” (34). But it is the relationship between Gerry and Susannah to which Enright returns most powerfully to explore the question of the host–parasite relations between subject and director. Their relationship provides some of the most direct dramatisation of questions of


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documentary ethics. In one of the scenes set in 1985, Gerry visits Susannah in the house she shares with friends, who are away on holiday. Susannah reminds him of a poem she had shown him a couple of years earlier, suggesting that it must have embarrassed him, because “a big klutz of an eighteen-year-old girl […] was possibly in love with you” (25). Claiming now to be “over it” she then suggests that this liberates them to “fuck […] with impunity” (26). Gerry asks her whether she’s ever had a boyfriend, to which she replies: “You know I haven’t, Gerry. You know everything about me. Every milestone has been yours for the taking, whatever that means” (26). Susannah’s wry wit underlines the significance of this. Gerry demurs momentarily with the paradoxical assertion of professional ethics: “But you’re my […] subject”, which she silences with the assurance that “I’m your subject. But you’re not my object. My object is experience” (26). The various implications here, in terms of the ownership and directing of Susannah’s experience – exhibitionism, exploitation, lack of privacy and invasion – are left open, and the implications of hospitality entwine like the ivy by which J. Hillis Miller metaphorises its complex relationships. Susannah and Gerry begin to kiss, and the scene ends, but the sense of incompletion is troubling. Much later, in 1990, Susannah raises the subject again: “What happened between us […] did that mean anything to you?” to which Gerry responds with the typically anodyne remark: “It was […] nice. But I felt like I’d crossed some line” (Enright 2003: 44). Susannah reveals that she was in love with him at the time, and that he chose to ignore that, and that he was, and has for a long time, been in love with Jessie: I hoped you’d see that. But you didn’t see. Not when it mattered. You see when you want to, when you’re shooting. You saw that silly poem I wrote. You see us all so clearly until you put that thing down. And then you can’t see what you’ve put on the screen for millions of strangers to see. You can’t read your own work […] It’s like a journal. And you know something? One page in every five is a valentine. (45)

Susannah’s observation again highlights the ways in which, emotionally, Gerry’s children have outgrown him, in their understandings of intimacy. But the tension concerning Gerry’s desire to see, and his

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desire to evade involvement, is most powerfully played out when another subject, Zoe, is caring for Susannah’s daughter, Gabrielle. Zoe suggests that the child may have a developmental problem involving a lack of responsiveness, a suggestion Gerry, perhaps ironically, reinforces, before taking his typical step back behind the camera to record the resulting exchange. Susannah erupts, and one of her accusations is that Zoe, rather than talking to her about the child’s problem, has sought out Gerry: “And who did she turn to? Not me, not the mother. She called the man with the camera” (66). To Gerry, she adds a confronting echo of the opening scene’s invocation: “Isn’t it enough that you’re enmeshed in our lives? Can’t you keep your hands off our children?” Gerry’s response glosses this in a certain way: “What do you think I am? The child snatcher out of some fairytale?” (66), but in the context of his relationship with the young Susannah, the darker implication is apparent. Susannah continues in a vein that interrogates Gerry’s professionalism: “You dropped everything to run here to make your snap-frozen judgement on my child. You’re not a filmmaker, you’re an ambulance-chaser. Somebody else’s bad news is your good luck” (66). Susannah’s charge may be concerned with his documentary-making, yet the idea of a disturbing rapaciousness extends beyond this, especially given her painful experiences with him as a young woman on the cusp of adulthood. The problematic aspects of Gerry’s figurative fathering of his subjects emerge into a consideration of the ethical boundaries between subject and director, which in turn opens up questions of responsible and irresponsible uses of power in the political. This exemplifies the way the theme of Australia’s political climate recurs, apparently incidentally, steadily enough to provide a sustained sub-theme, especially in terms of Jessie’s political activism and questions of ethnicity that emerge around Theo and Roger. At one stage Jessie and Theo argue about her activism in terms that evoke public discussion – and its evasions and occlusions – about Indigenous Australia of the time. As she puts it, deftly puncturing his argument about his own history’s Greek–Turkish relations paralleling the experiences of Indigenous Australians: “You kept your culture, you kept your language, you kept your kids. Theo, I’m not going to give you a fucking seminar” (61). But the more steady focus on this theme remains on the microcosmic: on Gerry, and the effects of his project on the lives of


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his selected subjects, and the self-reflexivity this engenders. Michael Apted’s Up series has increasingly brought a focus to these vexed issues of ownership, privacy and invasion. Paul Arthur comments that “as the chapters pile up, the series has become increasingly reflexive, focused on the previous footage, and what people think about the recording process” (Arthur 2006: 9). Similarly, Enright builds this theme so that the play culminates with the question of just how much Gerry has offered, and how much he has taken, even stolen. Describing the themes of the Up series, Tim Lucas comments on its “compelling study of human development and the influences of environment, opportunity, education, love and loneliness (and even the stress of committing to a lifelong documentary film project) […] the series has become increasingly about the impact of the programme on its participants” (Lucas 2006). The contours Enright traces are different from Apted’s. For Apted, and the left-leaning company that began the series, the intended focus was on class and opportunity, issues calibrated differently in the Australian context. While questions of education, opportunity, and the values enacted in the subjects’ lives come to reside at the heart of Enright’s play, he is focused, too, on the opportunities love offers his characters, and some of the play’s tensions centre on his desire to film aspects they might prefer to keep private: Jessie’s experimental kiss with Zoe, Cam’s proposal to Annie, and the characters’ last moments with Jessie. Juxtaposed with his own ineptitude, Gerry’s focus on the love between his characters suggests again his loneliness and losses. The reinvention of Big Brother, the figure embodying George Orwell’s dystopian vision of this subject – the erosion and control of the private sphere – exemplifies the ways in which the voyeurism and disclosure endemic in contemporary culture have become something of a fetish. What began in Orwell’s imagination as a cautionary tale has emerged as something widely and perhaps incautiously consumed and enjoyed, and the rapidly developing technologies associated with this self-exposure promise to wrench these questions further open. Subjects and objects merge, and people direct their own voyeuristic realities using webcams, blogs, You Tube, mobile phone technology and so on, so that it becomes very difficult to say who is directing whom, who is hosting whom, and where the power resides. Enright’s play anticipates this technological explosion, and explores the start of

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this burgeoning genre. The subject, for Enright, is just this, and he probes the area Susanna Egan describes when she says of 35 Up: These films invite discussion of editorial control, of the interaction of subject with interviewer, and of the effects of replaying past experience for present consideration. Each subject’s opportunities and limitations for scripting a past and a future feed into the narrative tensions between the lived moment and its celluloid “proof”, or the fiction that it seems to become. (Egan 1994: 598)

The idea that the recording of a life is a simple matter of watching, and collecting observable data, is one that has increasingly been interrogated in recent work on documentary, and in analogous work on life-writing. The position of the documentary-maker is not unlike that of the biographer, as imagined by Janet Malcolm as professional burglar, with whose transgressions the reader colludes “in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through they keyhole” (Malcolm 1994: 9). Malcolm meshes the legal and architectural in this imagining of the impulses behind the popularity of life-writing, of which, arguably, Gerry’s films are an example. For Malcolm, the genre involves transgression, being where one should not be, even touching, or stealing, others’ lives. Mark Andrejevic, writing about the burgeoning of reality television, or RTV, notes that the shows are often seen as testimony to an inordinate fascination with voyeurism on the one hand and fame on the other – pathologies of a society in which the public sphere has been eclipsed by the private. (Andrejevic 2004: 253)

Andrejevic complicates this view, exploring the economic aspects of the genre, and, in doing so, illuminates the kinds of reasons why a subject might relinquish his or her privacy: Willing subjection to surveillance, then, comes to serve as a demonstration of the strength of one’s self image – of one’s comfort level with oneself. Being “real” is proof of honesty, and the persistent gaze of the camera provides one way of guaranteeing that “realness”. Further, in a teeming society wherein one’s actions often go unnoticed by others, the reality of those actions can be validated if they are recorded and broadcasted – they become more real to oneself to the extent that they become real for others. Submission to comprehensive


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surveillance is a kind of institutionally ratified individuation. (Andrejevic 2004: 266)

This nexus of issues of voyeurism and individuation that Andrejevic identifies is important within Enright’s play, such as when Gerry films Jessie’s and Zoe’s kiss (7), then continues to edit it back into subsequent episodes as a flashback, arguing, in terms that suggest the erotic impulses and the voyeurism involved: “That’s how I build a rhythm” (13). More disturbingly, Gerry’s filming of Jessie as she is dying provokes the observation, echoing Malcolm’s image of burglary: “you took her last moment. You took her death from me, and you took it from yourself […] He got her, right to the end” (77). The second person’s intimacy collapses back into the third person, echoing the shifting pronouns, and shifting responsibility of Gerry’s opening speech. Recrimination surfaces early in the play, and builds to this peak. Earlier, Cam, revealing that he is aware of Gerry’s affair with his wife Annie, tells him: “I did a deal with the devil. And it’s you. You’re the devil. We did our deal and now I’m paying for it. And I’ll keep paying, won’t I? Won’t I, Gerry? Body and soul” (72). Cam’s outburst suggests the problems associated not only with stealing someone’s life, but also the question of the ways in which being a film subject might alter the course of that life, something referred to in an analogous social science context as “the observer effect”. As John McCallum comments in his introduction to the play: “the act of watching collapses the indeterminacy about what is happening and creates its own reality. How can Gerry possibly know, let alone document, what these lives might have been like had he not been there recording them?” (Enright 2003: ix). Again, hospitality offers a way of considering this. Its reciprocities highlight the fluency of power and responsibility between host and hosted, and their interdependence. The essential hospitality here, the play suggests, is that offered by the subjects, although each subject comes to regret the effects of this. The play might close with Gerry’s expression of a desire to follow the subjects “until they die” (78), but Enright counterpoints the self-congratulatory element of this with the choral effect of the coda, in which the “five children” together ask: “Why?” The question resounds, providing a disturbing response to the assertive desire that imbues Gerry’s opening speech. Only now, years later, can the children respond. The play returns repeatedly to these anxious questions, and the most crucial of these concerns the imbalance of

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power between observed and observer, staging the question against the backdrop of the profoundly anxious nation, waiting uneasily as peace – domestic and national – fractures.

Works cited Andrejevic, Mark. 2002. ‘The Kinder, Gentler Gaze of Big Brother: Reality TV in the Era of Digital Capitalism’ in New Media and Society 4: 251–252. Apted, Michael. 1963. The Up Series: The Complete Up Series First Run Features (DVD), 2007. Arthur, Paul. 2006. ‘Plucky Number Seven’ in Film Comment November–December (42): 6. Ebert, Roger. 1998. ‘The Up Documentaries’. On line at: http://rogerebert.suntimes. com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19981025/REVIEWS08/4010%0910370/102 325 (accessed 18 October 2007). Egan, Susanna. 1994. ‘Encounters in Camera: Autobiography as Interaction’ in Modern Fiction Studies (40.3): 593–618. Enright, Nick. 2003. A Man With Five Children. Sydney: Currency Press. Lucas, Tim. ‘Life and Nothing But’ review of 49 Up. Sight and Sound, November 2006. On line at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/3531 (accessed 4 August 2007). Malcolm, Janet. 1994. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Marr, David. 2003. ‘Nick Enright: Man of the Theatre, 1950–2003’, in The Sydney Morning Herald (2 April 2003). On line at: www.smh.com.au/articles/ 2003/04/01/1048962754801.htm (accessed 28 August 2007). Miller, J. Hillis. 1979. ‘The Critic as Host’, in Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller (eds) Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Seabury Press.

Chapter 10 “Loved Every Minute of It”: Nimrod, Enright’s The Venetian Twins and the Invention of Popular Theatre Julian Meyrick Abstract Nick Enright and Terence Clarke’s musical adaptation of The Venetian Twins was a key production both for the Nimrod Theatre in particular and Australian “New Wave” artists in general. Its success as part of the Interim Season at the Sydney Opera House in 1979 confirmed that a latter-day “popular theatre” aesthetic had well and truly arrived. But a close look at the adaptation raises complicated questions about the nature of New Wave self-description. The judgement at the time that the play was lightweight and throwaway can now be seen to be false. So what exactly was “popular” about the production, and how were “popular theatre” techniques deployed in transposing Goldoni’s original material? This chapter focuses on the literary detail of the adaptation to show that part of the reason for its success lay in its use of a new polyglot cultural consciousness – not a rejection of classical dramatic conventions, but their subtle and winning renovation.

On 28 November 1979 Anne Godfrey-Smith, a member of the Australia Council’s Theatre Board, went to see Nimrod Theatre’s The Venetian Twins at the Sydney Opera House. The adaptation of Goldoni’s I due gemelli Veneziani had a “book” by Nick Enright, a young theatre all-rounder well-known to the company but until then un-produced by it, with music supplied by Terence Clarke. Coming off the back of a short four-week rehearsal period (no Saturday afternoon calls) and an even shorter five-day bump-in (with two dress rehearsals and two previews squeezed in), the show opened to a storm of applause and was in the process of becoming that rarest of theatrical objects, a critical and popular success. The spectators, Godfrey-Smith noted in her confidential report, “loved every minute of it”: Including myself, not to mention Alan Edwards, both of whom had just had a long and awful day of Theatre Board meetings, were

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Nick Enright: An Actor’s Playwright depressed and had headaches. Ten minutes of this splendid nonsense had us both falling in the aisles along with everyone else […] John Bell once again managed to marry two styles and two widely separate periods in time and place and come up with an amazingly integrated show […] Goldoni and Henry Lawson one might think would be uneasy bedfellows, but not in this case. (Godfrey-Smith 1979)

Such a response was typical, not only in its breathy enthusiasm but in its view of the show’s core values. In review after review, during its initial season, a revival the following year and a national tour in 1981, the production was feted for its feather-brained theatricality, its joyous lack of serious structure and intent. “The nonsense of the plot about an identity mix-up is an excuse for the happy abundance of lyrics” noted Romola Costantino of The Sydney Morning Herald (1979: 8). “At last – a friendly, untidy show as the Opera House Drama Theatre!” crooned the Sun-Herald’s critic (1979: n.p.). “An irreverent, beguiling, successful frivolity” commented Tom O’Shanta of the Western Suburbs Courier (1979: n.p.). Reviewers around the country concurred: the National Times – “above all a happy production” (Le Moignan 1979: 70); the Melbourne Herald – “some may find the style too boisterous, but the young in heart will love this knockabout show” (‘Jolly Boisterous Fun’, Laurie Landray 1981: n.p.); The Age – “in [this] breezy and freewheeling version, anything goes – provided it serves the company’s cause, which is to revive the spirit of knockabout comedy” (‘A Breezy, Knockabout, Oz-Flavored [sic] Musical’, Leonard Radic 1981: 10); The Advertiser – “theatre at its most harmless made into art” (‘Offbeat is the Right Beat’, Tim Lloyd 1981: 10). Without doing a disservice to the material, Nimrod’s marketing went out of its way to emphasise the show’s links with the company’s “knit-one, purl-one” musical collaborations that had been a regular feature of its programme since earliest seasons: The Venetian Twins is the latest musical to be devised by Nimrod. Earlier works include Biggles, Ron Blair’s Flash Jim Vaux, Hamlet on Ice, The Last Supper Show, Ken Horler’s Ginge’s Last Stand, S. J. Spear’s Young Mo, Tim Gooding Rock-Ola and Robyn Archer’s Kold Komfort Kaffee. The Venetian Twins continues one line of Nimrod’s own particular style – a knockabout, informal and irreverent event which is shamelessly derivative and essentially popular, employing as much of the vulgarity and warmth of the Australian vaudeville tradition as can be crammed into the space of a couple of hours. (Enright papers 1981?)1

Nimrod, Enright’s The Venetian Twins and Popular Theatre

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Between critics and company, then, a particular image of T h e Venetian Twins has been handed down to history. “A knockabout, irreverent musical”, concludes Tony Sheldon in the Companion to Theatre in Australia, “witty designs, canny direction and a talented zany cast brought the romp irresistibly to life” (Parsons and Chance 1995: 622). “Irreverent”, “knockabout”, “a romp”: terms such as these, and their implied values, echo through Australian theatre in the 1970s and 1980s with such persistence that use of other descriptors seems unthinkable. The flow of consonant and mutually reinforcing adjectives and appeals to historical parallels, especially to vaudeville and melodrama, is without serious dissent, either from those who celebrated this turn in Australian theatre (most younger practitioners) or those, like critics Harry Kippax and Brian Hoad, who were more ambivalent in their response. The fit between the New Wave and the popular appears a perfect one.2 The Venetian Twins was the final and most glorious expression of this project – a low vehicle that, under the steady hand of a star director and a crack cast, protruded its garish but winning values into the windowless citadel of elite culture itself: the Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre. But is it true? Was The Venetian Twins simply, as the Sun-New Pictorial claimed, ‘A Crazy, Zany Night of Musical Fun’ (Bob Crimeen 1981: n.p.)? Did Nimrod serve the play by subsuming it into this rhetorical trope? Are New Wave gestures towards popular theatre borne out by actual production, and if so, in what ways? Like a series of connected rooms, the first, modest question opens up onto more troubling chambers. For, far from being a flimsy piece of theatrical pre-text, the play is a calculated and carefully constructed “national” comedy, and Enright’s adaptation a transposition not only of the form, but the spirit, of Goldoni’s original. That this was lost in the production’s noisy, albeit warm reception, is unsurprising since Enright, like Goldoni, was intent on subverting a tradition without drawing attention to the fact. The Venetian Twins is thus an exemplary vehicle for the easy and successful co-mingling of high and popular forms. In its own unique way, it drew audiences into a web of comic delight, recuperating the very dramatic values that both play and audiences were in theory conspiring to reject.

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The New Wave and popular theatre The links between alternative theatre in the 1970s, in the United Kingdom, North America and Australia, and an imagined (if not imaginary) popular theatre run so deep as to defy easy summation. As Western drama emerged out of self-conscious high-Modernist experiment in the post-war years, it opened itself up to a variety of other influences, both cross-cultural and trans-historical.3 In this respect, popular theatre was less a discrete stylistic inflexion than an incursion by a range of demotic performance sub-genres – everything from circus, cabaret and stand-up comedy, to side-shows and rock and roll. In Australia, the motley and hybrid nature of such influences struck an immediate chord and the dominant alternative companies of the period – the Nimrod Theatre in Sydney and the Australian Performing Group (APG) in Melbourne – self-consciously incorporated them into their historical affiliations and staging approach. The Legend of King O’Malley and Marvellous Melbourne, the two foundational shows of these respective groups (both staged in 1970), clearly demonstrated their indebtedness to popular theatre. Henceforward, received memories of Roy Rene, the Phillip Street revues, the vaudeville circuit, melodrama and pantomime combined to intoxicate the New Wave imagination to such an extent that peak statements often bore their direct imprint.4 Visually, too, the companies offered a lively, broad-appeal contrast to the muted tones of the older state theatres. Nimrod’s stage style utilised bright primary colours, its most memorable poster graphics supplied by pop artist Martin Sharp. Peter Corrigan, the APG’s main designer, was ferociously anti-conventional,5 his sets, tailored to the louche conditions of the Carlton Pram Factory, masterpieces of imaginative transgression. And if the connections were strong at the beginning of the period, they were even more intense by the end: Theatre Quarterly’s Theatre in Australia issue in 1977, Australasian Drama Studies’ Popular Theatre issue in 1983 and Meanjin’s Performing Arts in Australia issue in 1984, all bear witness to the extensive and decisive impact of the image of popular theatre on New Wave dramatic thinking. So what exactly was so appealing? Michael Booth, a UK academic at the Australasian Drama Studies Association (ADSA) Conference in 1982, and an authority on popular theatre, spoke in an upbeat way about the force of its influence in his key-note address:


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Popular theatre includes popular entertainment […] I use “entertainment” in the sense of an overtly commercial act of short duration which is totally dependent upon the performer’s technique and professional skills for its success. Into this category fall the music-hall comedian, the circus clown, the magician, the acrobat, and the juggler; these are showmen rather than conventional “theatre” people […] The experience of popular theatre is a widening experience, not a limiting one; it must, perforce, take in all sorts of performance and all sorts of performers. Surely this feeling of breadth, of the extension of experience, of the pushing back of boundaries, is the reason why so many people today are concerned with popular theatre. (Booth 1983: 4–5)

For many New Wave practitioners, Booth’s definition of the values of popular theatre (all agreed it defied precise definition as a skills-set) was inspiring and strategic. It was inspiring in that it promised an end to a colonial mentality that still took its cue from London and the British theatrical tradition. British plays, from Shakespeare to Shaw, occupied vast tracts of the mainstream repertoire.6 Australian actors had to adopt British BBC accents to perform them. Yet the cultural and political values they represented seemed to many increasingly alien, referenced by a string of historical and political associations that Australian audiences simply did not share.7 By contrast there were, and continued to be, many forms of popular entertainment that had taken vigorous native root. From nineteenth-century variety to twentieth-century restaurant theatre, it was easy to find accessible performance forms in Australia that looked only to themselves and their audience appeal to justify a right to the stage. It is possible to hear in the bugle-tootling of early APG and Nimrod artists an excitement building about what amounted to a change in theatrical habitus. Popular theatre, in its louche, messy extensiveness, its love of song, of juggling, of just about anything that could command attention was never, for the New Wave, an end in itself. It was a tool by which Australian theatre might undergo a reform of consciousness. Not only would an Australian drama eventuate, but fresh spectacles could be applied to the entire canon. What had been old could be made new again. The adaptation: literary values/performance form For a supposedly ephemeral vehicle, one bearing the stamp of actors, director and other creatives, the drafts of the adaptation of T h e

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Venetian Twins show surprisingly few amendments.8 True, a number of gags were inserted at the rehearsal stage (not the best ones); and a number of exchanges later written-out in a more extended way. But given that Enright was not present during rehearsals – indeed didn’t see the production until after it opened – and that during the play’s development, the composer Clarke didn’t actually meet Enright but received the lyrics, one song at a time, by mail;9 given all this, then the adaptation had to be relatively complete right from the outset if it was to have any shape at all. Two reasons account for this completeness. The first is the sophistication of the original material, the second the approach to its adaptation. For while Enright drew on his own, unique sources of inspiration,10 these influences were carefully married to both the soul and sense of Goldoni’s first dramatic masterpiece. The critical judgement of the Newcastle Morning Herald that the plot of The Venetian Twins was “a fey affair” (Barry Lowe 1979) is misleading. Goldoni’s play synthesised two major influences in eighteenth-century Italian theatre: the improvisatory bravura of Commedia dell’Arte and the linguistic complexity of Eurdite (academic) comedy. Goldoni, who began his career devising sketches for Commedia, soon branched out in a more literary direction. In 1748 his services were sought by the Medebac Troupe, with its famous Pantaloon, Cesare d’Arbes. When the fruits of the relationship, The Venetian Twins, were presented, it became the first play in which Commedia actors went on stage without their masks and triumphed. As translator Frederick Davies remarks, “with this play the most fickle and conservative audience in Italy gave its consent to the final disappearance of the old Comedy of Masks and to the building-up by Goldoni of a national comedy” (Davies 1968: 21). Commentators are clear: that The Venetian Twins now appears an example of the Commedia it was actually refashioning is simply the result of historical parallax. Goldoni re-channelled the energies of Commedia in a direction at once more literary, more realistic and more fun. The effectiveness of the results were borne out by his success as official dramatist for first the Teatro San Angelo (until 1753) and later the Teatro San Luca (until 1762). During this time he transformed attitudes not only towards characterisation and dialogue, but also to design and audience attendance (for the first time the gondoliere came in numbers to the


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theatre to see themselves portrayed on stage).11 That this upheaval in Italian drama appeared as a natural extension of existing theatrical values was due to the subtle and eclectic nature of Goldoni’s reforms, for: Goldoni did not completely throw out all vestiges of the Commedia dell’Arte. He cut the dead wood, but retained that which was alive and useful […] the aspects […] which were in harmony with his philosophy of realism, those which were closest to the reality of the Venetian life which he portrayed in his plays [.].. Certain typical Commedia elements […] are found in his earlier plays. Some aspects of classical drama important to the Commedia also carry over […] [such as] the sentenze finali or “moral of the story”. (Carroll 1981: 133)

The Venetian Twins – written specifically for the quick-sketch characterisation skills of d’Arbes – tells the story of Tonino and Zannetto, identical twin brothers with opposite temperaments: Tonino, dashing, brave, gallant, Zannetto, half country bumpkin, half nervous Nellie. The misunderstandings that ensue from mistaking one twin for the other fuel the lazzi-like scenes of the play – muddles with lovers, quarrels with servants, complications by villains. Episode piles on episode, until a finale in which Zannetto and his mortal enemy Pancratzio die and Tonino is handily left with his brother’s money, his long-pursued lover and a newly discovered sister. The action is fastpaced, the tone and temper good-humoured. The jokes are sharp but never sour. Masks become mask types, living human beings. The empty formalism of Baroque linguistic convention is replaced by flexible dialogue capable of expressing social and individual nuance. It is not the structure of Goldoni’s drama that is so radical but its animating spirit. A master of “mass, contrast, harmony, and light in a psychological sense” (Carroll 151), Enright conveys via the tone of The Venetian Twins the play’s immediacy, narrative effectiveness and sureness of touch. In Drew Forsythe, Nimrod, like the Medebac troupe before it, believed it had an actor whose comic skills were of the highest kind. Thus when Enright approached with the idea of adapting The Venetian Twins, having adapted Goldoni’s A Servant of Two Masters the year before, John Bell, one of its three artistic directors, immediately said yes. Around Forsythe, Nimrod gathered a formidably talented cast: musical theatre Wunderkinder Tony Taylor and Tony Sheldon,

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company regulars John McTernan and Valerie Bader, ring-in villain Barry Lovett (who took a while to get used to the Company’s fastpaced and ad-libbing ways),12 opera singer Jennifer McGregor and newcomer Annie Byron. The combination of specific skills and general stage experience was the perfect mix for an adaptation written in what might be called sincere pastiche – on the one hand tongue-incheek satire, on the other genuine homage. Enright did not change the location of Goldoni’s play or the timing of its action, which remained a single day in the Italian city of Verona in the middle of the eighteenth century. The cast of characters are the same (with the exception of Bargello, the policeman, turned into a mime). And the plot plays out substantively as before. A number of running gags – about farting, Grace Brothers department store and Noel Coward – were by definition missing from the original. But as Goldoni was writing for a sparky Commedia troupe used to improvisation, presumably the first production produced a crop of topical interpolations of its own. Of course Enright’s dialogue is colloquial Australian, as opposed to colloquial Venetian. However, the key value is colloquial and this is not an academic point. Venetian and Australian audiences noticed first the auricular accessibility of the play – loquacity married to familiar expression that took the play right out of the high-art category. Goldoni is justly famous for his extensive and dramatically felicitous verbal techniques: his ear for ciozoto, Tuscan and pavan (local Italian dialects), and his deft awareness of how language changes according to the social context of the speaker – that is the phenomenon of code-switching. Both these can be found deployed in Enright’s adaptation: in the archaic way of speaking Pancratzio, the Anglophone Judge adopts, and the “ocker” vernacular of the remaining characters, particularly Zannetto. Code-switching, or a failure to do so, mines a continual comic vein for characters and audience alike (for whom, in 1979, it was still unusual to hear Australian accents in the Sydney Opera House). Even at the smallest level, Enright took pains to produce Goldoni’s original effects. Take the battuta or “violent, slapstick argument […] often [arising] from the flimsiest causes” (Carroll 1981: 134). Here is Enright’s application of the technique to an up-dated exchange between Zannetto (mistaken for Tonino) and Lelio (an angry fop):

Nimrod, Enright’s The Venetian Twins and Popular Theatre LELIO: ZANNETTO: LELIO: ZANNETTO: LELIO: ZANNETTO: LELIO: ZANNETTO: LELIO: ZANNETTO: LELIO: ZANNETTO: LELIO: ZANNETTO: LELIO: ZANNETTO:

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Do you see this? (brandishes sword) Yes. Put your hand on yours. On mine? Yes. Not yours? No, yours. My what? Your hand. On what? Your sword. My sword? Yes. Oh my sword! Why? You said you would fight me any time. Must have slipped my mind (The Venetian Twins, prompt copy: 1–24)

If the adaptation was carefully wrought, this was no less true of the staging approach. While rehearsals might have been short, preproduction was extended. A young Stephen Curtis, fresh from the National Institute of Dramatic Art’s production course, was entrusted with the heavy responsibility of the design. He discovered that he and John Bell had similar ideas of how play and venue should be approached: I liked the geometry of the proscenium arch […] but I didn’t like sitting in the auditorium. I remember before John and I started working on the show […] we sat in the auditorium and just talked about […] how good it would be to reshape it somehow to make it feel […] welcoming. That was the definite strategy of the production design, right from the beginning. (Curtis 2007)

The result was an extravagantly imaginative approach to both set and costumes (“I did a lot of stylistic exploration over months [looking at] all sorts of things. I cottoned on pretty quickly to John’s eclecticism” (Curtis 2007). This involved substantial changes to the layout of the Drama Theatre. The front rows of seats were removed from the auditorium and a Commedia-style stage constructed with a simple red curtain at the front of the proscenium. Either side of this, new tiers of seating were erected, and a walkway built (in the teeth of opposition from Opera House administrators) connecting the stage to the auditorium floor. It was, as Romola Costantino pointed out, “a basically

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right and naturally focused design which transform[ed] the dreary box-like Drama Theatre” (Costantino 1979). But it is in the lyrics and music that the adaptation of The Venetian Twins is at one and the same time brilliantly original and truest to the spirit of Goldoni. There are no songs in the Italian comedy – none scripted, at any rate. There were fourteen in the Nimrod production, twenty in the first draft, but a number of reprises were later cut. They range in style from variety hall ditty (Song 1 “Twins/Twins/Peas in a pod/Two even stevens/And evens is odd”), to operatic aria (Song 10 ‘Beatrice’s Mad Scene’, for which Jennifer McGregor’s singing skills were vital), to Weill-style cabaret (Song 12 ‘The Ballard of Middle-Class Propriety’ – “The working class take the rap each time/Let’s drink a toast to white-collar crime”) and everything in between. Cleverly and meticulously scored by Terence Clarke for an on-stage band of five playing seven instruments,13 both music and lyrics achieve a degree of satirical accuracy that lifts the adaptation beyond the sensibility of the lampoon and into a structure of feeling wholly its own. Perhaps the most memorable musical moment is Zannetto’s lament for his lost country home, Song 9 ‘Jindyworoback’ [sic] : I’m going back, on the track, To Jindyworoback Coz Jindyworoback’s the home for me There’s an old-fashioned shack, Back in Jindyworoback, But it’s the grandest home on all of Italy. I’m a small-town boy, never meant to be a loner. Don’t wanna see Perugia, I don’t wanna see Cremona, And I’ll never, ever, ever have to see Verona Back in Jindyworoback. (The Venetian Twins, prompt copy: 2–3)

What did audiences think when Goldoni’s bejewelled eighteenth-century world was dovetailed with features so obviously culled from their own? Or when Forsythe appeared wearing what appeared to be a matador’s costume, complete with black hat and breeches? How did they reconcile Pancratzio’s antique idiom with his instruction to the on-stage band to “hit it boys” (2–5)? What did they think of Enright’s elasticated rhymes (benision/Venicean, Zannetto/ Amaretto, alive’ll/rival)? What did they make of the bewildering array


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of gags and references that drew on sources high and low for humour, bite and dramatic meaning? The answer is, clearly, they didn’t think anything at all; it all seemed completely natural. Since its inception, Nimrod Theatre had been building to a climactic dramatic statement, a show that would definitively express its own unique fugue of philosophical telos and theatrical technique. The Venetian Twins was that show. The production arrived culturally armed, ready to do battle in the bastion of mainstream values. But the ground was surprisingly easy to conquer. Nobody noticed the abrasions, chutzpah, incongruities and morganatic marriages of the adaptation. They were too busy enjoying their results. Conclusion Not everyone agreed with Booth’s “widening” claim about popular theatre.14 Other speakers at the ADSA Conference exhibited an older, Frankfurt School scepticism about the benefits of “affirmative culture’” – most especially, Tom Burvill: The emphasis on enjoyment suggests a palliative for, and more commonly an evasion of, the central material realities of most people’s lives. Through the false notion of “community” the political is consigned once more to the periphery, just as it was by the notions about popularity initially examined. The invention of this so-called Popular Theatre is a kind of cultural confidence-trick. The nationalistic, larrikin style in modern Australian theatre functions to reassure the cultural section of the petit bourgeois class that in spite of their superior taste, cultivation and knowledge they still have contact with “the people”. (Burvill 1983: 30)

Burvill’s definition of the popular reflects a Marxist class perspective, one held up at the time as the only form of valuation capable of systematic analysis. However, his view illuminates the two most positive features of popular theatre for New Wavers: first, it was not a tool for rejecting theatrical values, rather one for reclaiming them; and second, popular theatre was fun. “Fun”, which Booth at least saw as an indispensable attribute, does not rate mention in Burvill’s paper because “real” popular drama is about revealing to oppressed audiences the essential contradictions of their lives in capitalist society “a small section of the terrain occupied by theatre of anti-hegemonic expression […] centred consciously in the experience and perceptions of subordinate or oppressed classes or sub-cultures” (Burvill 30).

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But New Wavers had an entirely different understanding of popular theatre, and the shows it demanded had to be always fun no matter what problems it dealt with. This was what being popular meant: not the resuscitation of old forms, or bums on seats, but an engaging overturning of ideas, a robust use of accessible aesthetic structures, a will to fun that could never be divorced from ostensible content. Thus neither Booth’s commodious understanding of popular theatre, nor Burvill’s narrowing of it, sums up its allure for practitioners. What presents to the academic as historical stock is for the artist cultural flow. New Wave companies like Nimrod Theatre took a dynamic view of the art form, deploying key ideas and methods as weapons in a struggle for pleasure and truth. Thus we should not be surprised if we find in any one example of New Wave drama contradictory impulses and expressions. Popular theatre was a broad and multifaceted phenomenon. So was the New Wave use of it. “[The Venetian Twins’] greatest fascination is the way in which it confidently mines what I suddenly realised is a multi-layered and very real Australian theatrical tradition”, observed Alanna MacLean of The Canberra Times, the only reviewer who seemed aware of the true achievement of the piece. “That a major theatrical company can now spend time doing this in a light-hearted way is a measure of how far Australian theatre has come in the decade since the slightly selfconscious days of The Legend of King O’Malley” (MacLean 1981: 19). MacLean was right. The differences between The Venetian Twins and shows like King O’Malley were more profound than the similarities, whatever Nimrod’s marketing might say. Its true progenitors lay with the classics the company had been regularly staging along side its brash musicals, most especially its Shakespeares: Hamlet (1973), Richard III and Much Ado About Nothing (1976), The Comedy of Errors (1977), and Henry IV parts I and II (1978). These productions were not so much in rebellion against their source material as in disrespectful dialogue with it. They were intelligent, complex shows. If the effect, as with The Venetian Twins, was one of consummate accessibility, this did not indicate superficial thinking but the opposite. This raises questions about the direction of the explanatory spin. Was popular theatre coming to the rescue of elite drama, or was it, as in Goldoni’s time, the other way round? Were discarded popular theatre techniques given new life by being applied to


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dramatically complex vehicles? Were shows like The Venetian Twins examples not of latter-day popular theatre, but a new cultural synthesis powered by the voracity of late Modernism’s most aggressive expression, the theatrical avant-garde? The embracing of “low” cultural forms did not, for the New Wave, mean any abandoning of high-art goals: only their re-fashioning. The Venetian Twins formed part of the New South Wales State Government’s Interim Season – a conglomerate of productions drawn from the professional companies left in Sydney after the collapse of the de facto state theatre, the Old Tote in 1978.15 The Sydney Theatre Company, the state flagship theatre today, was yet to be. The Tote with its close affiliations to the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and the University of New South Wales, was no more. The 1979 Interim Season, curated by John Clarke and Elizabeth Butcher, was an eclectic affair, an animal without precise definition or intention, beyond the desire to keep the Drama Theatre open. Poised between the arid classicism of the Tote and the yet-to-be-realised commercialism of the STC, The Venetian Twins thus appeared at a culturally undecided moment. The freedom, the lack of fear, the show inspired, did this extend beyond the production to reflect a more general openness in society at large? It is hard to supply evidence for a Zeitgeist. But The Venetian Twins was spectacularly successful and touched a deep nerve with artists and audiences alike. If the adaptation itself was not directly responsible for a new-found confidence in Australian theatrical consciousness, it certainly promoted it and greatly benefited from the results: I can see it in my head. The actual choreography. I remember the colours vividly. The whole [show] is burnt into my brain, because I saw it again and again. I really did enjoy it. I was very impressed with the skills [of the cast] […] It was great […] It was the cheekiness of the Australian-Italian cross-over that [made] it appealing. That might seem a bit cute these days but back in the seventies we were still doing that kind of thing, making things Australian […] And Nick tuned into that […] with a light-touch. (Bell 2007)

Notes 1

‘The Venetian Twins: The Story and The Songs’, Enright Papers 1924–1936; 1959–1990 MLMSS 7000/7/10, Mitchell Library, Sydney. A number of the musicals referred to in this list were company-devised. Even when writers

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2

3

4

5 6

7 8

9 10

11

12 13

Nick Enright: An Actor’s Playwright were involved, there was scope for actors’ and director’s input. The loose-knit structure of the pieces attracted the “knit-one, purl-one” tag found in the press at the time. For a discussion of the term New Wave as applied to 1970s Australian theatre practitioners, see See How It Runs: Nimrod and the New Wave (Meyrick 2002), especially the Introduction (1–20). For an outline of “alternative” theatre post-1945 in the UK, see Steve Gooch’s All Together Now: An Alternative View of Theatre and the Community (Gooch 1984); for the USA, see Theodore Shank’s American Alternative Theatre (Shank 1982). For the impact of popular theatre on alternative theatre practices, see John McGrath classic, if trenchant A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre – Audience, Class and Form (McGrath 1981). See, for example, Jack Hibberd’s introduction to Three Popular Plays (Hibberd 1975), Dorothy Hewett’s ‘Shirts, Prams and Tomato Sauce’ (Hewett 1976), Katharine Brisbane’s ‘Preserving the Disreputable’ (Brisbane 1970) and Margaret Williams’ three classic Meanjin articles, ‘Snakes and Ladders’, ‘Mask and Cage’ and ‘Australian Drama’ (Williams 1972a, 1972b, 1972c). See Corrigan’s position statement, ‘Stage Space’ (Corrigan 1962). Between 1952 and 1963, for example, UK drama formed over 50% of the repertoire of the Melbourne Theatre Company. Between 1963 and 1969 it fell to 31% – still high by any absolute measure. Other state theatres had similar numbers of British plays in their programmes. For comparative repertoire information, see Meyrick 2002 ‘Figuring Nimrod’ (207–217). See, famously, Katharine Brisbane’s ‘Not Wrong – Just Different’ (Brisbane 1971). Drafts of the adaptation of The Venetian Twins can be found in the Nimrod Theatre Special Collection at the Mitchell Library, Sydney, Boxes 65–67. These include: a first draft (2 Acts, 100 pages, 20 songs); a small segment of the third draft; an unmarked rehearsal draft (fourth draft?), and a number of prompt copies (2 Acts, 78 pages, 12 songs). The prompt copy is substantially the same as the rehearsal draft; but, aside from some minor cuts and additions, there are not many changes from first draft to rehearsal draft either. All comments and quotations in this chapter focus on the stage manager’s prompt copy in Box 66. In Box 65 one can find all the drafts of the music: separate scores for each instrument, written out in long hand by Clarke himself, and a full score with all parts represented. Terry Clarke (2007). A revealing document in Enright’s personal papers is ‘Tales of the Tent Shows’ by Bobby Le Brun (The Outdoor Showman October–November 1981: 18–19). This is a colourful, positive, and for Enright clearly memorable précis of Australia’s tent show tradition. Enright papers 1924–36; 1959–90 MLMSS 7000/8/6. For this and other social and historical observations about the impact of Goldoni on Venetian theatre, see Marvin Carlson’s The Italian Stage: From Goldoni to D’Annunzio (Carlson 1981). See ‘Villain of Low Comedy’, The Age, 29 September 1981. Piano, trombone, flute, mandolin, banjo, clarinet and percussion.

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See also, in the same ADSA issue, Robyn Archer’s ‘The Politics of the Musical’ (33–45), a similarly acidulated view to Burvill’s and, more interestingly, John Docker’s ‘Unprecedented in History: Drama and the Dramatic in Television’ (47–61). For a discussion of the Interim Season, its administration and the other productions included in the programme, see Meyrick 2002, ‘Death of the Tote’ (180–185.)

Works cited Archer, R. 1983. ‘The Politics of the Musical’. Australasian Drama Studies Journal 1(2): 33–45. Australasian Drama Studies Journal, Popular Theatre Issue, 1983. 1(2). Bell, John. 2007. Interview with the author. 26 October 2007. Booth, Michael. 1983. ‘What is Popular Theatre’. Australasian Drama Studies Journal 1(2): 3–18. Brisbane, Katharine. 1971. ‘Preserving the Disreputable’ in Holloway, Peter (ed.) Contemporary Australian Drama 1st Edition. Sydney: Currency Press, 1981. —— 1971. ‘Not Wrong – Just Different’ in Holloway, Peter (ed.) Contemporary Australian Drama 2nd Edition. Sydney: Currency Press, 1987. Burvill, Tom. 1983. ‘The Politics of the Popular in Contemporary Australian Theatre’. Australasian Drama Studies Journal 1(2): 19–32. Carlson, Marvin. 1981. The Italian Stage: From Goldoni to D’Annunzio. New York City and London: McFarland & Company, Inc.. Carroll, Linda L. 1981. Language and Dialect in Ruzante and Goldoni. Ravenna: Longo Editore. Clarke, Terry. 2007. Interview with the author. 2 November 2007. Corrigan, Peter. 1962. ‘Stage Space’ in Holloway, Peter (ed.) Contemporary Australian Drama 1st Edition. Sydney: Currency Press, 1979. Costantino, Romola. 1979. ‘Venetian Treat for the Family’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (29 October 1979): 8. Crimeen, Bob. 1981. ‘A Crazy, Zany Night of Musical Fun’ in, Sun-News Pictorial, (18 September 1981). Curtis, Stephen. 2007. Interview with the author. 13 November 2007. Davies, Frederick (ed.). 1968. Reprinted 1982. Goldoni: Four Comedies. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books. Docker, J, 1983. ‘Unprecedented in History: Drama and the Dramatic in Television’. Australasian Drama Studies Journal 1(2): 47–61. Enright Papers, 1924–1936, 1959–1990. Mitchell Library, Sydney. Enright, N. and Terence Clarke. The Venetian Twins, Prompt Copy. Nimrod Theatre Special Collection, Box 66. Mitchell Library, Sydney. Glickfield, Leonard. 1981. ‘Twins Lost in Verona’, in Australian Jewish News (25 September 1981). Godfrey-Smith, Ann. 1979. ‘Performance Report’ (27 December 1979) on The Venetian Twins. Australia Council Nimrod Files: 80/715/007. Gooch, Steve. 1984. All Together Now: An Alternative View of Theatre and the Community. London: Methuen. Harris, Frank. 1979. ‘Laughter on the Road to Venice’, in Mirror (2 November 1979). —— 1979. Review of The Venetian Twins, in Sunday Times (4 November 1979).

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Hewett, Dorothy. 1976. ‘Shirts, Prams and Tomato Sauce’ in Holloway, Peter (ed.) Contemporary Australian Drama 2nd Edition. Sydney: Currency Press, 1989: 108–118. Hibberd, Jack. 1975. Three Popular Plays. Collingwood: Outback Press, 1976. Landray, Laurie. 1981. ‘Jolly, Boisterous Fun’ in Melbourne Herald (17 September 1981). Le Moignan, Michael. 1979. ‘Happy Production’ in National Times (10 November 1979): 70.. Lloyd, Tim. 1981. ‘Offbeat is the Right Beat’ in The Advertiser (28 August 1981): 10. Lowe, Barry. 1979. ‘Overcoming Dismal Opening’ in Newcastle Morning Herald (2 November 1979). MacLean, Alanna. 1981. ‘Many Layers of the Australian Theatrical Tradition Uncovered’ in Canberra Times (20 August 1981): 19. McGrath, John. 1981. A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre – Audience, Class and Form. London: Eyre Methuen. Meanjin, Performing Arts in Australia Issue, 1984. 43(1). Meyrick, Julian. 2002. See How It Runs: Nimrod and the New Wave. Sydney: Currency Press. Nimrod Theatre Special Collection, Mitchell Library, Sydney. Boxes 65, 66 and 67, containing draft and prompt copies of the adaptation of The Venetian Twins by Nick Enright and Terry Clarke and related rehearsal, production and musical composition notes. O’Shanta, Tom. 1979. ‘The Venetian Twins – Opera House’ in Western Suburbs Courier (6 November 1979). Parsons, Phillip with Victoria Chance (eds). 1995. Companion to Theatre in Australia. Sydney: Currency Press. Radic, Leonard. 1981. ‘A Breezy, Knockabout, Oz-Flavoured Musical’ in The Age (18 September 1981): 10. Shank, Theodore. 1982. American Alternative Theatre. London: Macmillan. Sun-Herald, 1979. ‘Bell’s Anarchy Warms a Black Theatre’ (28 October 1979). Theatre Quarterly, Australian Drama Issue, 1977. 7(26). Williams, Margaret. 1972a. ‘Snakes and Ladders’. Meanjin April 31(2): 179–182. —— 1972b. ‘Mask and Cage’. Meanjin June 31(3): 308–313. —— 1972c. ‘Australian Drama A Postscript: Some Comments on Recent Criticism’. Meanjin December 31(4): 444–448.

Chapter 11 Summer Rain: Sweet Nostalgia Susan Lever and Anne Pender Abstract Nick Enright’s musical, written with Terence Clarke, honours the musical styles and experiences of a previous Australian generation. This chapter explores the ironic, parodic way that it creates the Australian musical that never existed, a generation after it should have. Australian audiences of the 1940s and 1950s loved the Hollywood musical, and the great American Broadway musicals of the period. It was also a time when the old vaudeville troupes that travelled outback Australia were dying. The songs in Summer Rain deliberately reference both Hollywood and Australian traditions, lightly parodying them in ‘Watch the Puddles’, or improving them in ‘The Casuarina Tree’. At the same time, Enright’s musical presents a more modest and laconic Australian attitude that is tongue-in-cheek, and always light-hearted. This story of renewal, forgiveness and recovery after war and drought retrospectively promises a better future for the post-war generation. This chapter analyses some of the patterns of parody and allusion in the play, while arguing that its detailed reference to the language and history of the period prevents it from becoming mere pastiche, and that its humour undercuts its sentimentality.

Nick Enright originally wrote the musical Summer Rain with Terence Clarke for the seventeen members of the graduating class at the National Institute for Dramatic Art (NIDA) in 1983. Enright and Clarke were both teaching at NIDA, and the piece was written to show off the talents of students they knew well. Most professional theatrical productions in Australia reveal caution with regard to the demands made on performers, but Summer Rain from its inception accommodated a large cast and deliberately offered every member the chance to demonstrate acting, dancing and singing skills. As Enright explains in his ‘Stage History’ for the Currency Press (2001) version of the text, Summer Rain was developed further for a proposed (and cancelled) Bicentennial production in 1988, but did not have a professional production until the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) produced it in 1989. This version was not very successful, and it was

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not until the Queensland Theatre Company worked with the authors on developing a new version in 1997 that the show’s potential was evident. Enright and Clarke made further revisions and refinements for the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) production in March 2000 that formed the basis for the published text. This was also the script used by the STC for Robyn Nevin’s fully resourced production of 2005 (5 August–3 September). Summer Rain presents a travelling show (the Slocum Family Tent Show) that arrives in the drought-stricken town of Turnaround Creek on Christmas Eve 1945. Most of the townsfolk welcome the troupe but the publican, Barry Doyle, wants nothing to do with them. When the long-awaited rain pours down, the creek floods and leaves the showies stranded for nine days in the town. The Slocums put on a show that delights the locals and gradually the showies and the townsfolk begin to make friends and address some long-held secrets. The musical took over twenty years to develop from a graduation performance to a final professional production. Enright and Clarke had collaborated on The Venetian Twins and Variations before 1983 but, by 2000, Enright had worked on a wide range of other projects, including the nationally successful musical The Boy from Oz. His understanding of the limitations and potential of musical entertainment had grown, and the scenes at Turnaround Creek may recall the scenes of Peter Allen’s country childhood in the Australian version of The Boy from Oz. Nevertheless, Summer Rain remains a modest musical, utterly Australian not only in its subject but in its attitude to entertainment. The traditional senior principal, ingénue and comic roles of the Broadway musical are shared among a range of characters: Harold and Ruby Slocum appear to be the principal leads, but Barry Doyle and Renie McKenna challenge their dominance; Peg Hartigan’s flirtation with Johnny Slocum shares the stage with Cathy Doyle’s dreams of glamour; and Joy Slocum and Clarrie Nugent’s love affair provides only one of the comic strands, and just one of the romantic stories played out in the musical. Director Gale Edwards has compared Turnaround Creek to the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Enright and Clarke: ix), but it also has some of the magical qualities of the forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where young lovers are matched and mismatched, and mature ones behave like fools until they learn their lesson. The conjunction of nature and romance is captured in the title and the lyrics – “love comes down like

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summer rain” and the combination of the Australian midsummer setting, with the revelry of New Year’s Eve, suggests a deliberate reference to Shakespeare’s comedy. Yet in Turnaround Creek there is no forest; rather there is a river in flood, a lot of mud and the whispering casuarina trees. Summer Rain is egalitarian in its staging: there is no spectacularly dressed chorus ready to join in the big numbers, and all the named characters enjoy a moment in the spotlight. These qualities may have initially served the needs of a graduation production, but they become a virtue in asserting the Australian nature of the show – if we accept a preference for democracy over elitism as being Australian. Enright and Clarke clearly reference the history of Australian entertainment, and they expect their audience to understand their playful pastiche of past styles. It is one of the traditional laments of Australian cultural commentators that, though Australians flock to musical comedies from Broadway or London, Australia has never produced a successful musical of its own. In the 1940s, Australians loved Hollywood musicals (especially those films starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) and, after the Second World War, greeted professional productions of Broadway musicals (especially Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!) with enthusiasm. Their own musical traditions, though, remained with the kind of vaudeville shows that Harold and Ruby Slocum take round the country in Summer Rain. In a brilliant stroke, Enright and Clarke create the Australian musical that should have emerged in the 1950s in response to Oklahoma! and others like it, at the same time celebrating the musical entertainments that did exist. Summer Rain is the musical Australia should have had (preferably immediately after the war) but for many reasons couldn’t create. It offers its audiences what Australians have always enjoyed most – musical comedy – but insists on a laconic national style with a self-mocking humour, by contrast to the blockbusters from overseas. In 1979 Enright and Clarke had adapted Carlo Goldoni’s The Venetian Twins with great success, and demonstrated their mastery of the hybrid performance style. It was a distinctively Australian adaptation of a European classic, complete with local jokes, irreverent ad libs and topical references. Summer Rain took this even further. Enright and Clarke Australianised the American musical in its very essence, littering the script and songs with colloquial language, jokes

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and Australian English. Its understated style draws attention to the gap between the glamour of Hollywood and Broadway and the experience of Australian life, especially in the bush during the straitened war years. Part of the delight in watching Summer Rain in 2005 arose from the shared recognition that this is an early twenty-first century dream of Australian life at the end of the Second World War, rather than an authentic product of it. The musical parodies a range of 1940s films, songs and stories, creating Australian versions of their type in the knowledge that older members of the audience will understand and enjoy the references, while the younger members may be learning Australian entertainment history for themselves. Vaudeville acts fascinated Enright from childhood and the showies provide the touchstone for nostalgia in this musical. In his musical play On the Wallaby (first staged in 1980), also written for the actors who played in it, a pair of vaudeville comedians appears at regular intervals, offering comic relief and commentary on the grim fortunes of an Adelaide family during the Depression. Summer Rain builds on this earlier work, making the vaudeville act central to the plot. Slocum’s Tent Show presents some of the typical vaudeville entertainment of the travelling troupes: magic acts, cheesy jokes, dancing girls, songs, and elements of the freak shows familiar from the side-show alleys of Agricultural shows. Summer Rain opens with the troupe’s finale song as its members take their bows and give us a taste of their show’s contents: Magda, the exotic European singer; the short and tall Price Twins; the Flying Rinelli acrobats; and Harold’s magic act. We later see Johnny performing as the returned soldier in the kind of celebratory pageant that dates back to the end of the First World War. But song and dance are the basis for the tent shows and for the musical we are watching with Ruby and Joy leading the singing and dancing on stage. The arrival of the troupe in Turnaround Creek gives a rational, and almost natural, basis for the characters to burst into song and dance, rather than the artificial transition to song in conventional musicals. The opening of the School of Arts so that the performers can rehearse, provides the opportunity for the ‘Tango d’Amour’; Joy and Clarrie perform the ‘City Slicker/Country Girl’ song and Johnny marches on stage as Corporal John Slocum to sing ‘End of the Parade’ as part of the show. Other songs, though, emerge from occasions worthy of song – the rejoicing in the rain of ‘Send ’er Down, Hughie’,


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the Christmas drinking at the Shamrock Hotel for ‘Hear the One About’ and the song that drums in the New Year. Some songs gain a sense of naturalness from their referencing of other songs of the period in which the musical is set. We can believe that the characters know their Hollywood musicals well enough to mimic them, and enjoy their own local parody of them. When Joy and Clarrie dance in the rain, singing ‘Watch the Puddles’, they liken themselves to Fred and Ginger (maybe singing Irving Berlin’s ‘Isn’t It a Lovely Day?’ from Top Hat 1935), though the audience will also recall Gene Kelly in that other musical about entertainment in transition, Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Of course, the Australian characters are far from the world of top-hats, and are only jumping puddles, rather than mounting an ambitious rain-drenched routine (though the flooded stage for the 2005 production made for some slippery negotiations by the dancers). Harold sings a classic “on with the show” song for Cathy in ‘Once in a Blue Moon’, though the title’s recollection of the famous ‘Blue Moon’ song becomes a reference to the Australian usage of blue moon as an image of rarity. This layering of references creates a constant sense of ironic amusement: outback Australia is a long way from Hollywood. All this witty allusion to other well-known songs would be entertaining enough, and it is associated, in the course of events, with the professional entertainers, the Slocum family and their troupe of players. The emotional narrative of the play, though, belongs to the more taciturn locals of Turnaround Creek. The understatement of Summer Rain is set up by the laconic ‘Nothin’ Doin’’ that introduces the people of Turnaround; in the 2005 production by the STC, Mick, Clarrie and the other men onstage remained close to motionless as they sang this song of boredom, only moving at Peg’s insistence as she swept the floor around them. It’s a song of decay and even death (“by the creekbed the spring lambs die”) that sets up the quiet despair and grief of some of the townspeople. The men of Turnaround Creek bear the scars of the war with masculine stoicism, while the women long for affection and fun. Mick Hartigan and Clarrie Nugent carry contrasting legacies, with Mick embittered and crippled by war, and Clarrie acquiring some knowledge of the wider world to bolster his cheerful larrikinism. After two years at war in the Western Desert, Johnny Slocum also feels dissatisfied with his life. Col McKenna, we learn, has not returned and later Peg reveals that he was “blown to

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smithereens” (54). When Ruby Slocum exhorts Barry to reconcile with Renie and to move on from Nancy, Renie is symbolically “down by the War Memorial” (69). The visitors, the rain and the action over the nine days result in renewal and a “turnaround” for most of the characters, and new beginnings after the war. The rain and the showies arrive together, and the women of the town sense new possibilities on the horizon in ‘Something on the Wind’. Peg’s song ‘Stranger, Ride On Alone’ tells us how lonely and dull their lives have been. In Act One, Harold sings an introduction to ‘The Eyes of Nancy Doyle’ but Barry Doyle sings the full song, mourning his lost wife and revealing the source of his antagonism to Harold. After their reconciliation in Act Two, Harold joins him in a reprise of the song. Barry, however, sings the show’s central love song, the poignant ‘The Casuarina Tree’ – a song that rectifies one of the omissions of the past by creating a love song in the notoriously unromantic Australian bush ballad tradition. These are all interior songs, revealing the emotional life of the singers. They provide the undertone of pain and longing that will be healed by the extroverted fun of the Slocums, the rain, and the possibilities of love. The plot of Summer Rain refashions time-honoured theatrical traditions: sophisticated travellers encounter simple country folk, a lost child/father is discovered, a doomed illicit love affair is contrasted with a cheerful comic one. Like a Shakespeare comedy, its overall patterns of renewal are clear: rain breaks the drought, a baby is born, young lovers embark on a future together, old ones forgive each other, the war is finally forgotten as people commit themselves to a better future. This appears simple enough, though we need to see Johnny Slocum, Peg and Mick Hartigan re-enact the Harold Slocum, Nancy and Barry Doyle triangle in order to understand its emotional burden for Barry and Harold. Cathy’s presence indicates the intensity of the earlier affair, and Peg’s decision to stay with Mick affirms the real difficulties (as opposed to romance) of marriage. Through its knowing parody and humour, the play retains a lightness of touch that relieves any sentimentality. Ruby and Harold’s affirmation at the end is only for the “here and now” (72); Joy and Clarrie mock their own relationship when they sing the ‘City Slicker/Country Girl’ song. Just as Shakespeare leaves one of the lovers still under a magic spell at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so Enright leaves matters a little


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unresolved; at the end of the play, Peg must struggle on with Mick, and Cathy has gone to a future we can only speculate about. The Australian idiom and slang create much of the humour in Summer Rain but this also gives a sense of the play’s historic detail and authenticity. For example, ‘Once in a Blue Moon’ captures a host of Australian expressions: “yacker”, “not worth a cracker”, “chuck it”, “mozzies”, “Hay and Hell and Booligal”. But the idiom also suggests a whole narrative of the travelling life by clever reference to detail: “railway refreshment rooms and Brown Windsor soup”, “paper-thin walls and a baby with croup” (44). While railway refreshment rooms have long disappeared from Australian railway stations, Brown Windsor soup may only be found in old recipe books and babies are not so prone to croup, these details conjure up the world of the past. The song even includes some implied narratives – “the ingénue who robs you, and runs off with the drummer” (44). At the same time, Enright invents an expression that sounds like an authentic Australian metaphor and also serves as an image of the show’s ambitions – catching “lightning in a bucket” (44). Summer Rain carries its showbusiness excitement (lightning) in the humble receptacle of a simple story and songs (the bucket). When Renie and Ruby lament the inadequacies of their men in ‘You Might Miss the Mongrel When He’s Gone’, they refer to specific historical figures: Mr Chifley (the Prime Minister in 1946), Mo McCackie (the popular comedian), even Don Bradman. Then they proceed to call up a metonymic list of masculine foibles that implies a style of domestic Australian vulgar life: bay rum, greyhound pups and phone calls to the bookie, nicotine fingers, and occasional nooky. Their vocabulary is utterly Australian and vernacular: men are “mongrels”, “drongos”, worthy of a “barney”, a “ding dong”, a “bust up” or just “decking”. When Harold finally apologises to Ruby he says, “Forgive me. I’ve been a mongrel bastard to you” (71). Insults in the play are classics of Australian English, many of them dating from the 1920s; Renie bitterly calls Barry a “dead-set mongrel” (64) and Mick calls Harold and Johnny Slocum “mug lairs” (62). Even a serious song, such as Peg’s ‘Stranger, Ride on Alone’ relies on the detail of country life – the travelling library – to reveal Peg’s dreaming character and love of reading as an escape from the confinement of her daily life. Ruby’s ‘My Abracadabra Man’ refers to “the bloke in the cloak” (52) but, by and large, the more reflective

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songs are relatively free of slang and amusing idioms – they offer more universal emotions. ‘The Casuarina Tree’ sits within a long tradition of love laments, though the title draws attention to its particular Australian setting. Terence Clarke’s music reveals touches of jazz and blues in the songs that suggest longing and frustration, such as ‘Nothin’ Doin’’ or ‘Abracadabra Man’, while the showbusiness songs are extroverted and brassy. The love ballads (‘Summer Rain’, ‘The Eyes of Nancy Doyle’ and ‘The Casuarina Tree’) follow traditional melodic patterns, and the comic songs recall the cheerful simplicities of the music hall. The songs for the chorus, however, allow more complex musical harmonies and give the opportunity for strong singing. Despite the variety of musical styles, the chorus songs and the reprise of ‘Something on the Wind’ and ‘The Casuarina Tree’ help to place the different styles within a larger dramatic frame; one of the musical high-points is in Act Two when the various women reach the crisis of their decision-making while singing ‘Something in the Wind’. Rather than draw attention to themselves, the melodies consistently work to carry the wit or emotion of the drama. While most of the songs sound familiar because of their references to earlier songs in the genre, some of them move beyond pastiche to create memorable show tunes, particularly ‘Once in a Blue Moon’ and ‘The Casuarina Tree’. All this postmodern parody and ironic self-consciousness might have created a heartless show, a kind of second-hand pastiche of a musical comedy in Australian colloquial language. The out-of-date slang might have been artificial or cheesy, rather than funny. The achievement of Summer Rain is that its songs and story create characters that call for sympathy as well as laughter, and their speeches are witty rather than quaint. There is an ebullient and polished quality evident in the dialogue, and even the serious and poignant conversations offer wit and humour. For example, when Johnny declares his intention to leave the troupe, his exchange with Harold draws out the contrast between Harold’s view of the world (where the only imaginable ambition would be to work “legit”) and Johnny’s interest in a more sophisticated future, known to the audience. JOHNNY: Dad, it isn’t the show. It’s me that doesn’t fit. Not any more. HAROLD: You’ve had another offer.


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JOHNNY: Not quite. Listen to me – HAROLD: Is it the money? JOHNNY: Christ, no, or I would have shot through years ago. I need to move on. HAROLD: You want to work legit. I could run you up some dramatic monologues – JOHNNY: Will you listen, just once! You’ve never listened, except for your next cue. HAROLD: I’ve done my best for you, my boy. JOHNNY: I was never a boy, Dad […] I was a pro, even at twelve […] HAROLD: […] you’ll get back into the swing with us, Johnny-cake. JOHNNY: No, Dad! No more Johnny-cake. And no more trouping. (57)

The suggestion of Harold “running up” some dramatic monologues is hilarious, and Johnny’s retort quickly picks up on Harold’s stageobsessed perspective. Just as the Slocum Tent Show revives the people of Turnaround Creek, Summer Rain itself brings its audiences a spirit of optimism and fun, as all good musicals should do. The STC production of 2005 was greeted warmly by audiences and some critics (Hallett 2005: 25; McCallum 2005: 16), though it did not achieve the long-running success of big commercial musicals. The set recalled outback paintings by Russell Drysdale and the costumes strengthened its sense of period – as John McCallum commented, the cast look “like a bunch of characters from old outback movies”. But the production, with a full orchestra and intricate set (including rain showers and convincing thunder), seemed to be looking for the audience usually found at the big musicals (like The Boy from Oz), and McCallum thought it was over-produced and lacking an edge of bitterness. The WAAPA production of 2000, featuring student actors accompanied by a piano in a simple set, appears to have been just as effective. By 2005, too, Summer Rain seemed to offer nostalgia for a lost Australia – Colin Rose thought it exemplified the backward-looking nature of current Australian musical theatre: “In Summer Rain they sing about catching lightning in a bucket, but from where I was sitting it looked as if that bucket was brimming with sugary goo” (Rose 2005: 26). The show looks with fondness to a time before the great postwar immigrations of Southern Europeans and Asians that have transformed Australia, and when white Australians were cheerfully ignorant of colonial damage to Aboriginal Australians. In 2005 it

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could even be associated with the values of the conservative Howard government and its frequent reference to an ideal 1950s Australia. But Enright and Clarke do not idealise life in Turnaround Creek in 1945, and their affectionate mocking of the previous generation is not unlike Barry Humphries’ attitude to his enduring character Sandy Stone who represents Humphries’ parents’ generation with all their faults. In the early 1980s when it was first devised, Summer Rain came at the end of a period of enthusiastic revival of Australian theatrical culture. The play’s obvious Australianism can be seen as a more sophisticated and consciously theatrical development of the nationalist attitude evident in Bob Ellis and Michael Boddy’s The Legend of King O’Malley (first produced 1970), Jack Hibberd’s Dimboola (first produced 1969), or John Romeril’s and Hibberd’s Marvellous Melbourne (first produced 1970) – all musical plays that celebrated Australian vernacular language and humour in defiance of British and American theatrical traditions.1 Enright’s On the Wallaby, which included politicians Stanley Bruce and James Scullin among its characters, shares the historical and political interests of some of these plays. In its subject matter and style Summer Rain resembles The Man from Mukinupin, Dorothy Hewett’s musical play written for the sesquicentennial celebrations in Western Australia in 1979.2 Like Summer Rain, Hewett’s play deals with the aftermath of war (the First World War) in an Australian country town and introduces its musical elements through reference to vaudeville. It opens with Clemmy and Clarry, two retired theatrical types living in a desolate wheat-belt town announcing “another scorcher/Dust in summer/Mud in winter/That’s Mucka” (7). The scene is static like Scene 2 in Summer Rain, where the men stand still and repeat the refrain “nothin’ doin’”. Hewett was a poet and novelist as well as a playwright and she did not have the long association with commercial theatre of Enright. The language of The Man from Mukinupin is concentrated and rhythmic – closer to poetry than the fluid, naturalistic speech of Summer Rain. In a delightfully ironic line in Hewett’s play, Clarry Hummer states “fun and music are what the people want, dear” (19). But the fun and music in her play, including ridiculous travelling vaudeville acts, provide a cover for pain, disappointment, corruption and guilt. The Man from Mukinupin offers a lot less fun than Summer Rain because of its sometimes clumsy shifts of pace, its excessive theatricality, melodramatic plot and disturbing forays into much


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darker themes. Although both works tackle the forces of sexuality, Summer Rain retains a lightness of touch whereas Hewett’s play attempts a contrast of two spheres of life, a daytime world of light, and a night-time world of darkness and sin, that is sometimes strained. Though Polly performs one hauntingly beautiful song on her wedding day and there are other rousing tunes, the music of The Man from Mukinupin is not as integrated with the drama, nor as various and tuneful as that of Summer Rain. Dimboola, a play that includes its audience as members of a wedding reception, comes closer to the comic spirit of Summer Rain. The actors present a chaotic union of two families, arguing, singing and making speeches, while the audience eat a meal and occasionally join the actors in social dancing. Like Summer Rain, the play enjoys and mocks the rituals of earlier generations, and its jokes and songs rely on Australian notions of egalitarianism, with the audience sharing the playing area with the actors. These qualities have made it the most produced Australian play ever, with non-professional productions continuing around the country since the 1970s. Summer Rain is distinguished from other Australian musicals by its interest in the history of entertainment rather than politics and public figures, by its generous comedy and by its tuneful and memorable songs. It comes closer to the commercial idea of a musical than any of these predecessors, and its music is more thoroughly part of its characterisation and narrative. The delays in bringing it to a full professional production in a final version, however, meant that the STC production appeared at a time when it seemed to endorse a conservative and defensive notion of nationalism. As McCallum suggests, it might still be produced in a “grittier” style that emphasises the continuing Australian experiences of drought and war, and draws out the bitterness and residual disappointment in some of the characters. To date, all productions of Summer Rain have been nonprofessional or performed by subsidised theatre companies; it has never had the commercial production that would test its popularity with a wider Australian audience, like The Boy from Oz. It may be that its very modesty, and its deliberate undermining of the Broadwaystyle spectacular musical would disappoint the kind of audiences who flock to Billy Elliot or The Lion King. Its songs, with their witty mimicking of earlier styles, may be too far from the contemporary

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rock music that forms a staple of many recent musicals. Like Hibberd’s Dimboola, Summer Rain may live on in the more egalitarian, participatory world of non-professional theatre – a fate in keeping with its origins and spirit.

Notes 1 2

Series editor’s note: see McGillick 1988 and Griffiths (ed.) 1993. Series editor’s note: see Williams 1992.

Works cited Enright, Nicholas. Papers. Australian Defence Force Academy Library, ADFA, MS 51. Videotape of WAAPA performance of Summer Rain. —— 1982. On the Wallaby. Sydney: Currency. Enright, Nick and Terence Clarke. 2001. Summer Rain. Sydney: Currency. Griffiths, Gareth (ed). 1993. John Romeril, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hallett, Bryce. 2005. ‘Cheers from the Loving Cup’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (13 August 2005): 25. Hewett, Dorothy. 1979. The Man from Mukinupin: A Musical Play in Two Acts. Sydney: Currency/Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre. Hibberd, Jack. 1974. Dimboola: A Wedding Reception Play. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin. McCallum, John. 2005. ‘Flooded by Sweetness’ in The Australian (15 August 2005): 16. McGillick, Paul. 1988 Jack Hibberd. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Rose, Colin. 2005. ‘Backwards into a Bucket of Soggy Goo’ in The Sun-Herald (14 August 2005): 26. Williams, Margaret. 1992 Dorothy Hewett: The Feminine as Subversive. Sydney: Currency Press.

Part Two The Collaborator

Chapter 12 Nick Enright: A Man With Many Children George Ogilvie To know Nick Enright was to know an actor, a director, a raconteur, a musician, a teacher and perhaps above all, a playwright. I was fortunate in being an active part of his work in the last decade of his life, sharing many of his plays, with many a late night discussion on Australian Theatre, that exotic little cousin living out its life on the sidelines of the great Australian game, but for whom Nick never gave up hope. During that time Nick, more than any other professional partner, showed me what it was to be an Australian. It may seem a little odd to say this considering I was born here as well, but I was brought up as an expatriate Scot in a country that, during my youth, belonged heart and soul to the British Empire. The Mother Country dictated the attitudes of young people such as myself, who were hoping to become members of the non-existent professional theatre. The inevitable happened and those like me subsequently fled the shores of “down under” to take our place in the Mecca called London, desperately trying to get rid of our appalling accents. Fortunately for my soul I was chased back to Australia some three years later by the British Army, who seemed intent on employing me in their colonial exploits. As a result I became a member of the first Elizabethan Theatre Trust Drama Company and we toured Australia, bringing British Theatre to the masses. And quite right this was, considering the company was established in 1954 to celebrate the first visit of a young Queen to her far-flung colony, not because of a desperate need for our own theatre. In the same company, however, was an actor called Ray Lawler, who actually had the gall to write a play that not only required Australian accents but concerned itself with Australian life. This was

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my first contact with an Australian playwright, and as I sat in the audience at one of the early performances of this great play, I had the crazy notion of one day becoming a member of an Australian theatre company and celebrating the way we lived and thought. Some forty-five years later these memories crowded in as I sat taking notes at the dress rehearsal of Nick Enright’s A Man with Five Children; I have never been so proud of my Australian identity as I was that night. The years between were full of work with actors, designers and directors, but the keynote meetings were always those with writers, as they attempted to bring their love and knowledge of this country of ours to an audience, hoping that what they had to say might be considered important in celebrating our life here. In that same company back in the 1950s was another young actor called Peter Kenna who would become a close friend for many years. I watched this talented playwright write his plays, despair of ever presenting them, run away to London and finally return and at last begin to be recognised as a scribe with something important to say for those who cared to listen. He would have a great influence on the young Nick Enright and his future work. Peter’s struggle to be recognised has been repeated many times over in the ensuing years as young and talented playwrights emerged from behind the goalposts. Alongside this emerging talent an important and intelligent critic called Katharine Brisbane began writing and publicising this new beginning. Eventually Katharine, with her husband Phillip Parsons, established Currency Press and at last Australian playwrights were given the chance to be published and known beyond a small theatre group. Currency has published all of Nick’s plays and so given to the country a wonderful and supremely important legacy. During the early 1970s, from the depths of our southern city I heard the name of a young actor-come-director-come-playwright called Nick Enright. He, too, seemed to disappear abroad for a while but towards New York rather than London and I thought would be lost forever as so many before him. Not so. Nick returned and continued a career which illuminated the theatre scene for the next twenty-five years. As these things will and do happen, we met only on occasion but never managed to work together. I would be in the audience of all his plays and musicals and wonder if ever the day would come. In 1990 I saw Peter Kingston’s very fine production at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) of Nick’s latest offering,

Nick Enright: A Man With Many Children

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St James Infirmary Blues. I remember clearly my reaction to the play. I had admired many new plays from many new playwrights over the years and directed a number of them but always they seemed to be about the experience in life of ‘other Australians’. With St James Infirmary Blues, I felt it was about me, my youth and the accompanying hopes and despair, and I remember sitting in the stalls with tears coursing down my face as this playwright dug into my heart. Eighteen months later I was invited by Helmut Bakaitis to direct the play at the Q Theatre in Penrith, and for the first time Nick and I sat together at a rehearsal. In such intimate circumstances I began to learn that here was a man who loved theatre, loved being part of it but never was he in love with his own writing. He saw himself as a craftsman among other craftsmen. He not only sought but demanded criticism from his fellow theatre workers, whether they were directors, actors or designers. I discovered he was willing to go through as many drafts as was necessary until the work was satisfactory. And the changes in the script came about not while sitting around talking about it but seeing it rehearsed. To hear the words and actions come from the artists themselves was supremely important for Nick. Only then, when the dialogue was truly brought to life, could he see whether it worked. It was like composing music but not knowing its value until the musician played it. He saw theatre as a living, breathing experience and, like Chekhov, felt that the words on the page were meaningless until they were brought to life by the artist. I will always recall in the last days of Nick’s life, reading Gorky’s essay on Chekhov to Nick and sharing with him the wisdom and life of a man we both worshipped. The rehearsals became the most exciting time I’d ever had in the theatre. Every day brought new ideas, new findings. And the actors, discovering Nick’s generosity over his work, relaxed and sought his advice and praise. So many playwrights who had written fine work were nonetheless terrified of being judged and would avoid criticism and even discussion, preferring the director to do what he could to bring it alive. Nick loved watching the process but also knew when to disappear and leave the rehearsal to the director and actors. Here was a man born to do theatre. Our association as colleagues and friends strengthened and, before very long, Nick presented me with a new play, The Quartet

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from Rigoletto. When handing me the script he grinned and said, “Time we did a comedy together”. This delightful play proved once again to be an exciting experience in the rehearsal room and it was presented at the Q Theatre, once again, and subsequently at the Ensemble. It was during this time that I became more aware of the sense of humour that lay in all of Nick’s work. To laugh was essential. Like his mentor, Chekhov, he never created heroes, only flawed, silly and sometimes compassionate human beings. Musicals, the world of film, and teaching kept Nick busy year after year but when I began to write my own autobiography that stemmed from the days of St James Infirmary Blues, he nonetheless took time to edit and advise me on my early efforts. I keep a treasured page of the early manuscript with his notes scribbled in the margin, particularly those underlined and referred to with the telling word “URGH!” One day in 2001, while doing a lot of rewriting in my beloved Paris, the phone rang. It was Nick demanding that I come home immediately to direct his latest play. He hadn’t finished the writing but the Sydney Theatre Company had commissioned the play and were scheduling it for their new season. So A Man With Five Children came into my hands. Without hesitation I came back to Australia and we began to prepare for this complex piece of theatre. Here was a new adventure for Nick and for myself. We set out to combine, in one evening, the two art forms we had both been connected with for some years: film and theatre. The story concerned five children whose lives become public through regular television exposure from the age of seven. This public life would be put on film, and shown on vast video screens while their private lives would be played out by actors below the screens on stage. The story is controlled by one man, a documentary film-maker, who would of course never appear on film; only his questions to the five children are heard. Decisions had to be made prior to the stage rehearsals. It became necessary to schedule the film interviews before the stage rehearsals began; this was not ideal. It would have been so much better to rehearse the actors into their roles on stage before the filming began, but such was the scheduling problem that this was impossible.


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Nick and I decided we must cast the children as soon as possible so that he could reshape anything necessary to the personality of the actor. To ask thirty-year-old actors to audition as a seven-yearold sounds weird and difficult. It proved to be the easiest part of the process. We had wonderful days in the theatre watching seven-yearold adventures as a host of good actors recounted their memories of childhood. Within two weeks all the characters were cast and Nick could get down to the task of making a final draft of the play before the shoot began. In the meantime, I talked endlessly to the actors in the following weeks, helping them to prepare for the performance they had to give in front of camera before the stage rehearsals began. The play itself produced for me strong evidence of an almost obsessive trait within Nick’s writing: never, never to judge the actions of his characters. This play concerned the growth in influence that a documentary-maker had over the lives of these children, with inevitable tragic loss and disappointment. One might rightly think that the author would spell out blame and judgement on such a life. This, Nick refused to do. His job, as a playwright, he saw, was to lay out the events within characters’ lives in such a way as to present the characters with all their hopes, desires, intentions and actions, without judgement being made on them. As he said, “I'll leave that to the audience”. The film section of the play consisted of interviews with one or more of the children and with their partners as they grew older. A fortnight was set aside for this work and a studio and crew was gleaned from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School at Ryde. It was like going into the unknown for both Nick and myself as we took take after take of the actors trying to guess what the result might be combined with the stage performances. Film acting is vastly different from stage but our actors were well versed in both. Finally we were in the rehearsal room with a video machine and a copy of the interviews so that we could consider all the work together. It was fascinating and complex and I was very glad of having Nick by my side for almost the entire journey. It was perhaps my only experience of being so joined to the author and his ideas that we seemed to work as one. A computer expert was brought onto the team with the job of co-ordinating film and stage. He had to sit at the back of the theatre

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and bring to life the video machines above the actors as the cues were called from the corner. A very scary job and during two of the previews the computer broke down, to everyone’s consternation, and pauses had to be injected into the performances. So much for modern technology! There’s something to be said for a bunch of actors on stage with only themselves to worry about in telling an audience a story. For all of us, the question uppermost in our minds during the rehearsals was whether the two art forms fit together. Many of us thought that the film sections would swamp the small human figures on stage. I had forgotten the power of the live presence of people in front of a captive audience. Only one concession was agreed upon. A silent scene of the death of one of the children proved more than effective while its counterpart as a complex hospital scene on stage was cut. It says much for the playwright that, when this decision was placed before him at the dress rehearsal, he agreed without hesitation. Before I conclude I would like to read an excerpt from Nick’s notes published in the programme of the production of St James Infirmary Blues that I directed at the Q Theatre, Penrith, in 1992. […] I was a schoolboy at a Jesuit School, St. Ignatius College, Riverview, during the years of Australia’s participation in the Vietnam War, an involvement which was enthusiastically supported, indeed promoted by the school (the frontispiece of the 1966 school magazine is a portrait of Lyndon Baines Johnson). One stronger image survives: headlines in the Mirror about the sacking from another GPS [Great Public Schools] school of a boy who in protest against the war refused to serve in the Cadet Corps. His expulsion was vigorously defended by our Rector, a decent and humane man, at a public assembly. Two years later the headmaster of another GPS school made a public attack on the war and on the conscription of young Australians. Like many people who enjoyed the contradictory privileges of a private schooling, I am deeply ambivalent about the process, grateful for many of the benefits and perhaps ashamed of my own fearful conformity, and the lifelong habits of deceit that were instilled with it. […] Little boys were terrorised, older boys treated with great civility. The sadism of a few (names supplied on request) was never quite erased by the humanity and care of others. It is that version of maleness – brutal, unreflective, emotionally inarticulate – which I hope is the subject of this play.


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After George Ogilvie’s presentation at the 2005 Nick Enright Conference, Shaun Goss and Garth Holcombe, two students from NIDA, performed a scene from St James Infirmary. The scene brings together two young enemies – Bowker, the son of an army man, who is about to enter Duntroon, and Dominic, a rebellious young artist, who painted an anti-war mural on the wall of the drill hall prior to the important passing-out parade.

Chapter 13 Nick Enright: Friend Sandy Gore Nick and I met some thirty-four years ago in 1973. It was not a particularly auspicious beginning. I was a fledgling actress with the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC), performing in David Williamson’s Jugglers Three. It was the first time the MTC had produced a Williamson play and it was an outstanding success. A regional Victorian tour was planned, followed by seasons in Sydney, Canberra, Newcastle and Brisbane. Our original director was unavailable and word filtered down that a “young gun”, Sydney University graduate who’d been tooling around the Nimrod Theatre (now the Griffin) was to redirect the play. His name was Nick Enright. Nick duly arrived and impressed all with his charm, remarkable intelligence, wit, swag of theatrical stories and knowledge of Australian theatrical history. My response was different. He was impossibly handsome, attention seeking, arrogant, overtly confident, a name-dropper, boring and all in all a bit of a fraud. He considered me to be aloof, judgmental and intimidating. And no doubt I was. So we were not off to a good start! Rehearsals were cordial and we tolerated each other. Nick was twenty-two and I was twenty-three. Once we were on the road Nick would visit us from time to time, he was now directing the Youth Theatre at MTC. His notes on the play were always accurate and incisive – there was a slight thaw between us but the distance remained. During one such visit we were staying at some fabulous country pub lounging around after the show. It was well past midnight, and we were a happy band of itinerants – actors, fruit pickers, commercial travellers and the odd local. The faint aroma of marijuana was wafting through the room when these two very burly gentlemen leading two equally burly german shepherds made their way through the bar. “Oh dear this could get ugly”, I said to no one in particular. One of the locals lying in the beanbag nearby

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said. “No worries, those blokes own the pub. She’s sweet, they’re cops”. Before I could fully process this little piece of information, there was a snort and a very loud guffaw, which then swelled into a sound (similar to that of the hyena) and I turned to find my director rolled up in a ball and laughing so hard I thought he would burst something. Well of course that set me off and when the poor little fellow in the beanbag said, “What’s so funny?” we were both helpless with laughter, and that was the defining moment – to see this man with his defences down was surprisingly endearing. When we finally came to rest Nick said, “You know you’ve changed over the past six months” to which I replied “No I haven’t: you’re just getting to know me”. And that was the beginning of our friendship. The tour continued on to Newcastle and Nick joined us yet again. His family was from nearby Maitland and there was much excitement as three of us from the cast were to stay with Nick and his parents in the family home. The Enrights were great hosts and each night we would leave for the drive to Newcastle having had yet another delicious home-cooked meal after the frequently abysmal pub fare we’d known through the tour. There was a cloud, however. Nick came from a long line of lawyers and it was expected that he would follow the same path. His father was not happy about his chosen career and Nick was determined his Dad would see the play and realise and share his dream. This was not to be and each night after the show we would look keenly for Mr Enright senior. (Siblings of course attended.) Nick’s pain was palpable – he so wanted his Dad’s acceptance. The following year Nick was accepted into the Directors’ course at New York University (NYU). It was a three-year course (which by-the-by he topped!) I really missed him. Bruce Myles, fellow actor and mutual friend double-dared me to go to New York. I had little money and had never been overseas. “Save up” was Bruce’s advice, “he’s there for three years”. And so I did. In 1976, if actors were truly interested in their craft, they made their way to England, but I headed to New York and Nick. He introduced me to the Broadway musical; A Chorus Line was my first. “I think it’s a piece of poop”, said Nick, “but it’s the biggest thing on Broadway at the moment”. We also saw Streamers, a play written by David Rabe in 1976, and directed by Mike Nichols; in addition we saw The Royal Family (written by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber in 1927), a

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play about the Barrymore acting dynasty. When the actress playing John Barrymore’s mother ascended the staircase to her bedroom for what we the audience know would be for the last time, Nick’s wry comment with his hand on his heart was “fabulous back acting girlie”. Nick’s apartment was a subway ride away or a walk through Central Park. Nick had thrice been mugged walking through the park, usually for just a few dollars, and had learnt from other NYU students that in this event the best course of action was to stand your ground, eyeball your would-be assailant and say “Piss off, you mother f----r”. It was a brisk and uneventful twenty-minute walk home, no doubt aided by our frequent mantra said large and loud into the wooded distance. Nick was about to direct an all-Black version of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll with the students at NYU, a project that excited him. His days were full, he was being schooled at one of the best institutes for the Arts in America and yet, something was missing. “Are you lonely?” I asked. “How could I be lonely? I’m never alone” was his curt reply. Then as if to temper that remark he said: But I am really homesick […] Look, Sandy, it’s not as if I go to bed with corks hanging off my hat but I am reading a lot of Henry Lawson, and eighteen months into this course I have come to know that I do not wish to redefine another country’s culture […] I wish to define my own.

Nick returned to Melbourne after graduating top of the class and went to Adelaide shortly after to work with Colin George at the South Australian Theatre Company again as assistant director. We would visit each other from time to time, me to Adelaide and he to my little weatherboard in Williamstown, Melbourne. This was a happy time for Nick and he relished the small theatrical community and the sense of family it gave him. In the early 1980s I moved to America with my partner George Miller and, when our daughter was born there in 1986, I called Nick within forty-eight hours of her birth and said “Hello, Godfather!” And what a mighty godfather he proved to be. We returned to Sydney in 1988 to find Nick at a career low. He was teaching at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and loved it and his students, and this was reciprocated. His former students speak of before and after the Nick Enright years, such was his contribution. But his playwriting ambitions were at a standstill. Yes he had written On The Wallaby and Summer Rain and was

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teaching and still acting, but he was depressed and terribly frustrated. His friend David Marr suggested that he write a comedy. Nick called me with his idea about an exchange student in Laguna Beach, California, and his first great love. Nick had lived such a life as an exchange student in Laguna Beach – “Don’t talk about it, just write it”, I said. And within ten days Daylight Saving arrived in the mail with the inscription “this is for you”. As a first draft, apart from a few overly long phone calls, it was, in my opinion, pretty near perfect. Within a few months it had found a season at the Ensemble Theatre with Peter Kingston as director and within forty-eight hours after the opening performance, it was completely booked out and the box office was closed. The success of the play was a huge sweetener for Nick and indeed, all these years down the track, it is a joy to know that two of his monologues, one from Daylight Saving and the other from Blackrock, are included in the NIDA audition speeches. Daylight Saving was a turning point for Nick. Early on in rehearsals for the play, Nick had said, “Girlie if this doesn’t work, I’ll never write again”. “Thanks” I replied, “that’s just what I needed to hear!” With the success of Daylight Saving, Nick shifted into another gear. He finally had enough money to renovate his beloved Newtown cottage called “Budgewoi” and his professional life moved onto another plane. In 1989, Nick and George Miller collaborated on a screenplay called Lorenzo’s Oil, the true story of young boy’s battle with adrenolukadystrophy, a hereditary metabolic disorder for which no cure is known. The film starred Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte as Lorenzo’s parents and was nominated for two Academy Awards, one for Susan and the second for the best-adapted screenplay. In March 1990 Nick and I headed off to the Academy Awards. First-class comfort, lots of champagne and all the latest film releases. No sleep, just sheer indulgence for us both and probably the happiest plane journey I’ve experienced in my life. There were to be no award wins in either category, but what fun we had. Early a.m. in the car park Nick had another of his hysterical giggling fits. Crowds were queuing for the stretch limos to transport us home and immediately in front and behind us were Clint Eastwood and Sharon Stone. “Oh girlie” said Nick, “Car parks are great levellers”. The Academy Award nomination brought many offers in the USA, but one alone stood out: Halfway Home, a novel about a young


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Catholic gay man who, upon being diagnosed with HIV, sets about to reunite with his family, in particular a brother with whom he has had a fractious relationship. Nick invested his all into this project and was encouraged enormously by the studio. Then slowly word filtered down that the subject matter was a little too provocative, perhaps it should be a little more upbeat, maybe even have a happy ending! Nick refused to accommodate these requests and other writers were brought on board. Devastated, he walked away from the project rather than face more compromise and closed the door on Hollywood. “I’ll stick to what I know”, he said. It would be another five years before the issue of AIDS was addressed, when Tom Hanks starred in and won the Academy Award for Philadelphia (1993). Offers continued to come in but Nick had made up his mind and refocused on home turf, wounded as he was by the Hollywood experience. In 1998, he came up with the play Chasing the Dragon, written for myself and Vanessa Downing, about a mother’s search for her daughter and the tug-of-war of love. It is a spare, beautifully written piece about reconnecting with family, the ongoing conduit within all of Nick’s work. His opening night card to me read as follows: “Oh girlie! Save Yourself!! Just say the lines and don’t bump into the other actors”. Prior to this Nick and Justin Monjo had been doing the almost unthinkable, collaborating on adapting Tim Winton’s novel of Cloudstreet for the stage. After an extraordinary success throughout Australia, the Belvoir Theatre Company production moved overseas. From New York I received this from Nick: September 30th 2001 Darling Sandy – Sunday’s New York Times article by Benedict Nightingale, Chief theatre critic of The Times of London “The Opening Night of Cloudstreet in Sydney in January 1998 is already part of Australian folklore. If anyone had suggested at the end of the first act that Justin Monjo and his former acting teacher Nick Enright’s adaptation of Tim Winton’s novel would triumph in Sydney, Melbourne, Zurich, Dublin, the London fringe and at the Royal National Theatre in London, he would have been clapped into a strait jacket!”

And then of course there was The Boy From Oz, a collaboration with Ben Gannon as producer, Gale Edwards as director and Max Lambert

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as musical director and Nick writing the book about Peter Allen, the boy from Tenterfield. It was a momentous success that finally saw the musical on Broadway with Hugh Jackman as Peter Allen. But Nick was no longer with us, having died in March 2003. In January 2001 as we were driving up to the central coast – Nick, myself and my daughter Augusta, his goddaughter – he said: “Now girls, news on the health front is not good, the melanoma is back’’. (Nick had a cancerous mole removed in 1986.) We drove the last kilometre to Nick’s house and, as he took hold of his duffle bag, he looked me in the eyes and for the first and only time I saw his fear. After supper that night Nick said, “As for what follows, let’s wait and see. Trust me, I’m not being proud and stoic and I’m aware of all possible outcomes. Let’s take it a step at a time”. And from that moment forward, it was business as usual. Not daunted by his illness he collaborated with David King on The Good Fight that was showcased by the students from the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts. He quotes a local Western Australian critic in an email to me: “Darling. Thought you might like to see this”. Inspiration Dances in the Ring The story of Les Darcy, Australia’s middleweight boxing crown champion during World War One. The Good Fight is so intelligently constructed and executed that it deserves a glorious future. Nick Enright’s search for a sense of national identity led him to the story of boxer Les Darcy, a could-have-been contender for the middleweight crown during World War One. In a brilliant piece of writing for the theatre Enright has linked Darcy’s fate to a parallel story of another young man from his hometown of Maitland who was in a different and anonymous sense, a fellow Australian hero.

Nick was particularly proud of this student showcase and truly hoped that at some point a full production would be mounted. The boy from Maitland had come full circle. Nick cherished his friends, his “A Team” as we were called. Life was about dinner at “Budgewoi” and chewing the fat. Dinner was more often than not risotto with chorizo sausage or baked salmon with green salad, followed by his gourmet standard, summer pudding, and a singalong around the piano. We were family. Nick’s plays were all about family, loss of family, looking for family, reuniting with family, coming home to the bosom of family and finding one’s roots again. Four years has passed and still


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we miss him. Miss his voice, strength, manliness, wisdom, guidance, silliness, miss his love. One of Nick’s favorite sayings was “Oh girlie, you wouldn’t be dead for quids”. Each full moon, wherever I am, I eyeball that glorious orb and give it right back to him.

Chapter 14 Nick Enright: An Acting Teacher Recollected Karen Vickery When asked to address a conference on the subject of Nick Enright as a teacher of acting, my first response was to feel overwhelmed by responsibility and emotion. I felt a duty to my fellow actors, each of whom had their own profound connection to Nick, and treasured their own particular lessons from him as artists. But, above all, I did not want to disappoint him. I have consulted with some of my colleagues who were also taught by Nick in the early 1980s at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney. In particular, what is written here is thanks to Lyn Pierse, Antoinette Sampson and Rob Sampson, who have spent time with me discussing our work with Nick and his legacy as a teacher of acting. The remarkable thing that emerged from our discussions was the essential similarity of our individual stories about working with Nick. Some of what follows is really a composite of experiences. In the early 1990s Nick addressed a group of aspiring playwrights at NIDA. They were suitably amazed by this “renaissance man” who had succeeded as a playwright, actor, director and librettist. Nick was asked: “What is your favourite aspect of working in the theatre? What are you best at?” Without hesitation, Nick replied, “Working with actors.” (Ken Healey)

In 1982 a group of Second-Year Acting students at NIDA were having a meeting. We were discussing who we would like as an acting teacher, having recently found ourselves without anyone filling that key role full-time. George Whaley had just gone to Canberra, Aubrey

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Mellor to Queensland. The other teacher we had heard of was George Ogilvie, but he was unavailable, too. Circumstances had decreed that there was a vacancy and we were naïve enough to think that we could demand whomever we thought suitable. One of our number, Stephen Vidler, spoke up: “There’s this guy called Nick Enright that I know from the Q Theatre.” Lyn Pierse asked, “Who’s he?” “Well, he’s a writer” replied Vidler. “We don’t need a bloody writer, we need an acting teacher!” said Pierse.

Fiona Press vouched for him from the Q, and we agreed to put him on our list. I hasten to add that all of this is from the perspective of a twenty-two-year-old student, and bears no necessary relationship to historical fact. My recollections as recorded here are unashamedly personal, biased and, no doubt, far from accurate, when it comes to gauging our impact on the choice of candidate for this crucial role, and the period of hiatus before the role was filled. Unbeknown to us, John Clark had been seeking Enright, too, and was rather better informed than we were. I was one of the class of 1983, Nick’s first group of actors during his tenure as Head of Acting at NIDA. (1983 was our final year.) I can remember the day that we first met Nick. He came and addressed us in the old army barracks that formerly housed NIDA, opposite Randwick Racecourse. He was not a great deal older than us, in his early thirties. The eldest of us was twenty-nine himself, but Nick made a profound impression. He had done so much more than we, and had so much to give us. It was the steady clarity of his eyes, his intensity, his passion and his gentleness that first struck me. This may seem sentimental, but I knew in that first moment this was not someone I wanted to disappoint, and that feeling is still with me. The first meeting with Nick runs like a movie in my memory, and having spoken to several of my classmates recently, they feel the same way. What happened was quite unusual. In the normal course of events, the Head of Acting, together with the Director, is responsible for selecting the students from candidates at the annual auditions; In this case, however, we felt we had chosen Nick. It must have been

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daunting, therefore, to face those twenty-two young people on that sticky Sydney afternoon. We were so eager and hungry to learn that we hung on his every word. We claimed him in that moment and we were lucky to work with him, many of us continuing to do so at different times throughout our professional careers. The dinners for all twenty-three, first in Edgecliff, then in his Newtown cottage, were frequent, always with a major project to discuss over the meal. Nick loved to don an apron and oven-mit, and produce wonderful feasts which were greedily devoured by hungry students. There were singalongs with Nick and Terence Clarke after barbeques at NIDA (that’s when we discovered that Nick was musical, too). In the more recent past, Nick hosted a series of ten-year reunions for his NIDA graduates, again throwing open his home and cooking up a storm. We had to hold our twenty-year reunion without him, but because of him, we knew we had to have one. In terms of our training, Nick’s work as recalled was disturbingly simple. The class of 1983 graduated to continue as actors, teachers, actors’ agents, writers and directors, and what we gained from Nick influences us all in different ways. The heart of the work was what Nick called the “linear work” and “personalisation”. With these terms, Nick referred to the actor making a personal commitment and connection to the text; every phrase had to be claimed and personalised as your own experience or thought. The main point to grasp in this preparatory work on text is that it is a mistake to begin supplying emotions and attaching them to the text at an early stage, something actors are inclined to do too readily. This can result in demonstrating what the actor thinks a role may be and what sort of person they are playing instead of discovering the deep inner processes of the character. Linear work allows the actor to search for what is being said instead of how to say it. Personalisation requires the actor to experience the character’s situation, empathising and feeling it as if it were their own situation – Stanislavsky’s “magic if”. One simple exercise I recall, and have subsequently used with young actors, involves two actors in a scene sitting opposite each other, knee to knee, scripts in hand. In a painstaking process the actor must look at each phrase of the text, absorb the information, make personal and imaginative connection with it, and then, looking directly into the eyes of her partner, say the phrase with simplicity, truth and connection. The actor must repeat the phrase until both partners in the

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scene are satisfied that the words and thoughts supplied by the playwright have “dropped in” and are emotionally and intellectually connected – so the actor “identifies” and does not just “represent”. Nick would oversee this process with us. He was hard to fool. After this central process was grounded, Nick would then work toward building on the connection between the actors, the dynamic flow. He talked of always moving towards something in the acting, avoiding stasis, but affecting and being affected by others in the work. The goal was always to change the other person and allow yourself to be changed, too. Another class I recall is one of which my colleagues also speak. This is a particular example of where our individual experience is shared in a peculiar way. We each feel that this is our unique breakthrough moment with Nick, and yet our stories are eerily similar. I can only conclude that this was a central lesson which we all experienced with Nick at one time or another. We had been asked to prepare a monologue from a play, an audition piece. I worked and worked on this piece. Finally, I was satisfied that I’d done the linear work, and personalised the material to the point of pain. I could think, feel and behave in character. I was the character. In the class, it was my turn. I started acting. It felt great. When I’d finished, I was exhausted. I waited for a response. “Just tell me the story”, he said. I paused. “Just say it.” I decided not to think and “just said” the first few lines without acting at all. My throat started to ache, my eyes welled with tears and I looked at Nick in astonishment. He smiled. It was that simple. A classmate will claim this story as her own. It is her story. It is also mine, in another class perhaps, or rehearsal. We each recall the detail and, most importantly, the experience of these acting lessons twenty-three years after they occurred. Nick was an exceptional teacher. The lesson was to do the work; this included the sweat, the puzzling, the imagining, the historical, contextual research, understanding the grammar and language of the playwright, the intentions, and the purpose of each moment, and then letting go of it all, surrendering to the moment and communicating it as simply as possible, trusting yourself. The last was the hardest lesson and the most important for me. I still fail to do it sometimes, but I always know when I’m failing. Here is a quote from my notebook of that period:


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Contact needs to be made with the other actor. At the early stages of rehearsal, don’t make decisions about feelings. Acknowledge and discover the feeling that arises within you. Make no character choices – for example, just ask the question if there is one in the text and don’t pre-empt that it’s sarcastic. Let the thoughts in the scene take you. Don’t run over the feeling and step back from it, but don’t manufacture it. Discover the truth behind the words for you – then you can make character decisions (for example: my character avoids pain). Acknowledge your feelings, don’t try to overcome them. Pursue the want against all the obstacles.

I shared these notes with students in an acting tutorial recently. It is such good advice as to how to use a four-to-six-week rehearsal period to greatest effect; how to mine the most out of the opportunity to explore a text over time. I was recently reminded by colleagues that always, at the end of a scene, Nick would ask the actors, “Well, what did you think?” We always wanted to yell back, “No! What did you think?”, but we never did. The process was truly important to Nick. Remember, when asked what he most loved, his reply was, “Working with actors”. In recalling the work we did with Nick and attempting to convey its essence, I keep thinking that I’m doing him a disservice, that I should be sharing some mysterious secrets with you. Nick was an acting teacher who sat forward on his chair, keenly and excitedly observing and participating. He did not ask you to come to him, or hold his cards close to his chest. Nick did not play the guru, or exert his power; he demystified processes. Of course, there were many more lessons, but when I try to decide what was at the core of his teaching for us these are the things I carry inside me. The Money or the Box was our first show in our final year in 1983. We co-opted a core group from our class who returned to NIDA in late January, before the official start to the school year, to brainstorm ideas for a self-devised play. We chose a 1960s game show, complete with wheel-of-fortune, as the narrative structural device which connected each of the tribes of our story. We chose a group of Eastern European immigrants, some young surfies from the northern beaches in Sydney with a garage band, and a few sporting heroes, with the game show hosts as narrator/commentators, in our attempt to describe and explore where we had all come from, born in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Nick encouraged us to create and tell our own stories, to continue to build the Australian repertoire, to be fascinated

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by our own neighbourhoods and families, to “make strange” the mundanely familiar. After this initial period of brainstorming to create what he called the “spine” of the play, the remaining cohort of actors returned from the vacation to find themselves cast by Nick and the core group of peers who’d worked together during the past weeks. (There was a precedent to this process the year before, when Nick had divided the class into two groups – city folk and country folk. We’d constructed and devised a lengthy improvisation developing family groupings, characters and histories.) Later these characters found themselves subtly altered or vastly changed in The Money or the Box and Summer Rain. Early weeks of rehearsal involved each core group in extended improvisation, closely guided by Nick who assiduously took notes and prompted key plot changes or devices into the unfolding saga. He would present us with the situation, we would improvise the scene and the next day Nick would give us a drafted script. I don’t know when he slept. No one had computers then, so script changes were arduous to carry out. All the time he was also building the spine and narrative connective tissue of the play in close consultation with the company. Collaboration and hard work were the core values that Nick imparted, and he did so by example. It could be tough, but we had to keep up. His standards were high and his own commitment and achievement gave us a benchmark. We didn’t want to disappoint him. At the end of each term, and after each major performance, each actor would receive their own handwritten letter of assessment. A personal signed letter was given to each of us. I still have some of those letters. One line from my first letter from Nick read, “I feel on our slender acquaintance that I am very much in the presence of an actor, an actor who should strive to be more personal and trusting. I would like to encourage you to risk more of yourself, to trust that your resources as an actor will not be diminished by risking yourself, but enhanced.” It’s something that I’ve kept for many years, and will always remember. We didn’t want to disappoint him and he did not disappoint us. Our graduation production in 1983 was Summer Rain, a writing and musical collaboration between Nick Enright and Terence Clarke, directed by Gale Edwards and choreographed by Keith Bain. The play was received with great enthusiasm. Many of us had worked with


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Terence in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard the year before and developed a close relationship. We knew we were incredibly lucky to be the recipients of that rare creature “the Australian musical” and one tailor-made for our ensemble of actors, with seventeen leading roles, each with a fascinating story-line, an emotional journey and growth. I played Ruby Slocum, matriarch of the travelling tent show troupe. In this original version of the work, Ruby was a knife-thrower and control freak with an eye for younger women and a nose for trouble. She was a daring character and very funny, and I adored playing her. An example of how daring and thrilling it was came in the all-female apache, choreographed by Keith Bain with Helen Buday and myself to Terence Clarke’s music; I particularly remember dragging a clinging Helen across the stage as she stuck like a limpet to my thigh! The tale was of city meets country, as the down-on-their-luck travelling troupe, the Slocum Family Travelling Tent Show, rolled into Turnaround Creek and proceeded to turn everything around. Much of the premise has remained the same after multiple revisions: after months of crippling drought the rains come, trapping the troupe in the town for nine life-changing days. It was an extraordinary experience for our Final Year Company, and I remember how joyous it was. We played and laughed and cried and really sparkled. It was funny, sentimental, frightening and life-affirming. Many years later in 2002, I was teaching at NIDA when Nick gathered a group of Final-Year actors who agreed to return from vacation early to work with him, following a series of workshops the year before. The result was Country Music, the first main stage performance to deal with the story of boat people from the Middle East and their reception in this country. Much had changed but the essential focus on creating our own Australian stories, working collaboratively, and passing the torch to younger professionals was just as evident, despite Nick’s growing reputation in theatre. His generous collaboration and encouragement extended beyond the rehearsal room for many. In my own case, Nick and John Clark commissioned me to create two translations and adaptations of Russian plays while I was a student, starting me on a track I still follow. Nick made useful suggestions on drafts of the work, particularly Gorky’s Summerfolk, and encouraged me to work as a dramaturg on productions of Russian plays. I worked in this capacity on Chekhov and Gorky productions at NIDA, and have continued this

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work both at NIDA and in the professional arena. Nick started many of us on tracks we still pursue, seeking our skills and passions beyond the core subject of acting, guiding us to build the profession in as many ways as we were able. When I heard that Nick was going to direct a Second-Year production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters at NIDA in 2001, I telephoned him. We had not seen each other for years, except in passing, but he greeted me as though little time had passed and immediately agreed to my coming in to rehearsals to monitor and observe his process with actors and the text. Always generous and collaborative, Nick invited me to act as dramaturg. There followed a series of the most delightful emails which we exchanged, exploring the minutiae of Chekhov’s glorious play. The process, as Nick had promised on the phone, had changed and developed over the years. He had new ways of exploring the work with actors. Knowing these young artists were very daunted by the canonical Chekhov, and indeed daunted by Nick’s own distinguished career, he set up a huge table in the centre of the rehearsal room, a kind of family dining table, around which we all sat. Nick asked us to discuss and write down the “events of the play”, the occurrences of the story on huge sheets of butcher’s paper – who enters from where, what happens while they are present, what happens when they leave etc. These large sheets were then pinned all around the walls of the rehearsal room. As the production was actually going to take place in this same room, Nick laid down the simple floor plan right from the start, describing it as the space of the play. It was in the round. He invited the actors to play within the space, to explore the story physically and vocally in freedom, to be silly, spontaneous, to speak gibberish if they wanted, but to use the record of events of the play which we had produced to inform the improvisation. Nick was exploring the method of active analysis that Stanislavsky had adopted at the end of his career. Watching this process unfold was a revelation, as characters claimed their inner worlds, and the inner life of Chekhov’s play revealed itself with startling clarity. One particular example, from many, stays in my memory. Bojana Novakovic, playing Irina, has a speech in the early part of the play celebrating her joyous happiness on her nameday, as she emerges from mourning the death of her father, like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. In physicalising


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this irrepressible joy, the actress did a yoga back-bend revealing her toned belly. She moved around the space belly-up. As if magnetised, a flotilla of male characters, all of whom are in love with Irina, fixated as one on the actress’s navel, and travelled like a fleet of boats in her wake. This sense of hopeless romantic fixation never left the play, although the back-bend did, and the magnetism of her character was established unforgettably. So, indeed, the processes that Nick used with actors had changed, but the core values of the linear work and personalisation had not. The way to achieve this connection had become freer, more playful and more physically focused. This Three Sisters company was composed of the same group of actors who went on to create Country Music with Nick. For me, there was an extraordinary and elegant symmetry, as twenty years before, our class had moved through work on Chekhov towards our devised show The Money or the Box and then later Summer Rain. Now this year of young actors, to whom I felt very close, were having their own experiences with him. They, too, were intensely conscious that they wanted to live up to what he offered them, and they did not want to disappoint him. I hope that this very personal account conveys something of the man who was a profound influence on so many students over two decades and, through these students, on Australian theatre and performance. Nick’s work with students at both NIDA and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) have created a legacy. I can personally attest that his legacy continues at NIDA. Several people who were taught by Nick in the 1980s teach acting there today, and his scripts and some footage of his productions are archived at NIDA. There is a photograph of our acting teacher, together with an astonishing array of awards he received, looking out onto our foyer, reminding us to remember and to honour what he offered us, to continue to grow artistically and personally through commitment to the work he loved, and reminding us also that we do not want to disappoint him.

Acknowledgement Special thanks to Lyn Pierse, Antoinette Sampson, Rob Sampson and Dean Carey. Also, thanks to Ken Healey.

Chapter 15 Prima Le Parole E Poi La Musica Terence Clarke The title of this chapter, as I am sure I do not need to tell you, may be Englished as “First the words, and then the music”. And, if you know that, then I shan’t have to add that the name of Salieri’s opera is actually Prima la musica e poi le parole: “First the music, and then the words”. In my collaboration with Nick Enright, it was usually le parole first – but sometimes la musica. More of that anon. But Prima la musica. I first met Nick through the Nimrod Theatre (where I think he spent most of his time when not at Sydney University), in 1969 when he was nineteen. I was thirty-four, and still teaching – a career I abandoned the following year, thanks to the insupportable behaviour of my headmaster (and my thanks are genuine: I should otherwise now be a retired non-composing mathematics teacher, and unheard). In 1970 Nimrod had just started and John Bell was looking for someone who could act, play piano and – possibly – compose a little. That is how my collaboration with Ron Blair on Flash Jim Vaux came about, in 1971. The following year Nimrod revived it, and it was taken on a ten-week tour of New South Wales. Nick, by this time BA, Syd – I was one of those who unsuccessfully tried to persuade him to proceed to an Honours year – was gofer at Nimrod, and joined the tour as Assistant Stage Manager. Our friendship was cemented, and he had the questionable experience of hearing my music every night. He got an Australia Council grant to study directing at New York University; went, studied, learnt, absorbed, and returned to Australia in the late 1970s, and joined the South Australian Theatre Company (as it was then known) as, I think, Assistant – perhaps later Associate (his CV does not make this clear) – Director. It was from there that he wrote to John Bell that, if he was ever looking for a vehicle for Drew Forsythe, there was a play by Goldoni, I due gemelli

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Veneziani, in which the lead played two markedly contrasting roles. Nimrod Theatre was flourishing. When John Clark and Elizabeth Butcher came to prepare the first and interim season of the new Sydney Theatre Company, they invited the leading companies in the town to submit ideas for plays under the umbrella title of ‘World Theatre Season’. John remembered the Goldoni, and commissioned a translation/version from Nick. He then wrote to Nick, “Do you think it could be a musical?” He did. And suggested that I write the music. John had directed the first production of Flash Jim Vaux, and, perhaps for that reason, agreed. Nick set about finding places in the text that might be musicked, and sent frequent packets of lyrics across from Adelaide, which I proceeded to set to music without really knowing where they might occur in the finished play. I was so inexperienced at the job of collaborating on a musical that it did not even occur to me to ask. Nimrod flew me across to Adelaide for Nick to hear the music, and so that we might clean up loose ends, and, in particular, write the finaletto and finale. I doubt that many collaborations have been so arbitrary, so casual, and the fruit so quickly ripened; certainly few successful ones can have been. Of course we had no idea that The Venetian Twins would last beyond December 1979, but it very quickly found an audience, played to excellent houses, and its season was twice extended. I think it was to the last performance of that first season of The Venetian Twins that Sir John Drummond, then Artistic Director of the Edinburgh Festival, came. He invited us to the 1980 Festival. Excitement all round. The Nimrod general manager, however, decided that this would not be announced until closer to the Festival, which turned out to be a mistake. Around June or July Drummond wired Nimrod to say that “he could find no theatre” for the show; offer cancelled. It was too late to generate dismay within the profession, appeals to funding bodies, and so on. It is tempting to speculate how various careers might have been affected, had we gone. In particular, I regret the fact that Drew Forsythe’s spectacularly funny (and sometimes touching) twin creations were not seen beyond our shores. By way of a footnote, I fast forward to the night of 22 December 1990, which was simultaneously the last night of the Sydney season of the third production of Twins, and the occasion of Nick’s fortieth birthday, which was celebrated at an after-show party at David Marr’s (David is Nick’s literary executor). Among the guests

Prima Le Parole E Poi La Musica

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were Timothy West and his wife Prunella Scales whom Nick had got to know and with whom he maintained one of his many, many correspondences (and this before email). After the couple had made the approving noises that visiting celebrities are expected to make in this country, I said to Tim, whom by this time I had got to know tolerably well through Nick, “I don’t know how it strikes you, but to me it seems that Drew is a star in our firmament”. His exact reply, here rendered verbatim: “He is a great star, and a great clown, and this performance should be seen throughout the world.” (How perceptive of Nick to know that Drew was in essence a clown, and to suggest a role that fitted him so perfectly; sadly, he has never again had such a leading role, though sometimes playing the clown.) Unlike some visiting celebrities, Tim matched his words with action: he was at the time on the board of the Bristol Old Vic, and he did his best to convince the artistic director to take the production. He later told me: “There is a limit to what a board member can suggest to an artistic director.” Having been on both sides of that, I can only agree. So Drew’s brilliance, sadly, has not been seen outside Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide. Nick and I were both a little disappointed that, after the success of Twins, no one asked for a second helping. We felt that, had Sydney been New York or London, producers, entrepreneurs, theatre companies, film companies, all would have been knocking at our doors – or so we liked to think. But Nimrod did commission a second musical theatre work, to a topic of our own choosing. (I should perhaps add here that Nick always called The Venetian Twins a musical comedy, and our other two collaborations musicals.) By this time, 1981 or so, Nick had moved back to Sydney. It was always he, the playwright, who chose the subject matter and wrote the libretto (or book, as it is less pretentiously but perhaps more confusingly called, in the world of the musical). Not everyone may know that on musical collaborations it is usual to have a librettist, a lyricist, a composer, and an arranger: he combined the first two functions, and I the second. The new work, called by Nick Chamber Music, but played as Variations, was to be set in inner Sydney; and I had better say something more about the concerns and plot. It concerned three generations of women: the grandmother, looking for a violinist to partner her on the cello; her daughter, Meg, a successful lawyer and single mother,

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and daughter-in-law, Fran, escaping from a routine marriage; and her granddaughter, falling in love for the first time, with a young busker/ would-be musician. Their men were, respectively, an Austrian migrant cellist; a Greek actor/taxi driver pursuing Meg; Fran’s bruised and uncomprehending husband (Meg’s brother); the banjo-playing boyfriend. It also required an actress to play a variety of roles, whom I called The Other Woman – the name stuck, and was used in the program. Nick’s parents had a holiday flat at Port Stephen where we holed ourselves away to write. The distinguished pianist Sharon Raschke (later to be musical director of two productions of our works: Twins in its second manifestation, and Summer Rain in Queensland) very hospitably gave us the use of two adjoining rooms in her Newcastle house, one with a grand piano, so each day we drove into Newcastle. The nature of our collaboration there reached a glorious peak, which was never to be repeated, and it was at least partly due to our physical proximity and the way we were able to work. I instance the number ‘1962’, sung by Fran just after she has turned up uninvited at her sister-in-law’s house, seeking temporary shelter. Which came first in ‘1962’, words or music? Very hard to say. I believe the germinating idea was Fran’s words, given in response to a ringing and unanswered phone, starting “I’m sorry, Fran isn’t here at the moment …”; this suggested a musical idea to me, and that idea had its own continuation, which Nick liked, so he scrapped his original next line and wrote to fit my suggestion. So we went on, one or the other of us going into the neighbouring room, or me calling him to the piano, the ball passing back and forth till the song was finished. I cannot imagine a more wonderful way of working: marrying words and music by marrying two ways of thinking, each with an equal contribution. “Marrying”. It is, of course, a cliché to compare an artistic collaboration to a marriage. And yet, it seems to me, who have experienced both, to be pretty exact. Nick never married – never, to my knowledge, had a live-in partner. I am inclined to think, perhaps hubristically, that our collaboration with its very high highs and appalling lows, the uncanny wordless communication, the enjoyment of our companionship alternating with a need for privacy, even secrecy – and, yes!, the rows – was as close as he ever came to a marriage. Though, as he liked to joke, he was not a faithful spouse, collaborating at various times with other composers: Alan John


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(Orlando Rourke), David King (The Betrothed; The Voyage of Mary Bryant and its revision, Mary Bryant; The Good Fight), Max Lambert (Miracle City), and Graham Dudley (Snow Queen). Although I had collaborated prior to our collaboration with Ron Blair, John Croyston, and Dorothy Hewett, once we had begun to collaborate, I did not stray. When you have worked with someone like Nick, you are spoiled; indeed, I have not worked to anyone else’s lyrics since our collaboration petered out, nor have I wanted to. Summer Rain was commissioned by John Clark and Elizabeth Butcher, then Director and Administrator (now General Manager) of NIDA, as the graduation play for the class of 1983 (which, incidentally, included, Karen Vickery, who created the role of Ruby Slocum). By this time Nick was Head of Acting at NIDA. There was some resistance from the actors to the idea of a musical to showcase their work, as not all were perfect singers. But when they realised that Nick would undertake to write a play with seventeen equal roles (a task of immense difficulty, which he, amazingly, pulled off), each tailored to suit the talents of the individual, they changed their collective mind. As Head of Acting, Nick knew each of the seventeen actors very well; their strengths, what each needed, how best each could be shown to advantage; the dissenters realised how fortunate they were to be assured of equal roles, specifically designed for each. It found a small cult audience, a small enthusiastic band of supporters. Brian Hoad wrote in an uncharacteristically warm and complimentary review in The Bulletin that the New South Wales Arts Council should buy a tent and tour the production around the country. (They didn’t.) Huge thanks to those original seventeen, to the designers and crew, and – certainly not least – to Gale Edwards, who shaped and directed it. The nature of this collaboration was different. By this time, Nick was starting to enjoy success as a playwright. If inside every fat man a thin man is struggling to get out, then I think it may be that inside every reasonable man, every homme moyen sensuel, a control freak struggles to be heard. I mean no disrespect when I say that I experienced in Nick, from this time on, a conflicted being: one who was intellectually and passionately committed to the idea of theatre workers’ collaborating as equals, but who by nature felt the need to be in charge. I once said to him that I envied his professionalism – he was professional in every fibre – but that I thought that he might

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sometimes envy my amateurism (which I intend not pejoratively or apologetically, but by which I meant doing what one does for love, perhaps occasionally, rather than by profession, regularly). I can’t remember what his response to this was, if indeed he did respond, but I nevertheless think that it may have been true. Summer Rain was the third (and last) musical that Nick and I collaborated on, but in a sense it was also the fourth, fifth, and sixth, as it was much revised. The major revision occurred in the first fully professional production, which was at the Sydney Theatre Company. I still miss from that version some songs that Nick could find no room or reason for in the second and subsequent versions, and that gave place to others: in particular, the anti-troupe quartet (two of them after that first version consigned to cyberspace) singing ‘Show Ponies’; ‘Love Has Lousy Timing’ sung by another disappeared couple; ‘Come Christmas’, though the verse remains with other words; ‘Watch It Coming Down’ (new words to a song I had written to Dorothy Hewett’s words for the only-once-produced Catspaw), to be replaced by ‘Send ’er Down, Hughie!’. This disappearance of songs was at least partially due to the fact that the second version had only fifteen actors (not all characters went: two more appeared, including Miss Maisie Trengrove, who stayed), and the third only thirteen (which is all Robyn Nevin could afford for her opening season as Artistic Director of the Queensland Theatre Company). The major change was to have the romance of the present generation echo that of the older one, which required considerable rethinking and rewriting. It was Nick’s practice to ask if I had any “bottom-drawer” songs that might be recycled with different words. I remember playing a song, written years before for Ellis and Brooksbank’s Whitlam Days, that was to become ‘Nine Day Wonder’: Nick said, “How would that sound in the minor?” How it would sound you can hear for yourself; ‘The Casuarina Tree’, which – so keen was Nick’s feeling for various genres – many have assumed is a traditional Australian folksong. We both took this as a considerable compliment. That is to draw attention to Nick’s great musicality: he was a competent pianist, and knew the musical considerations that good lyricists should have to know (but too few do). His musicality was an inestimable advantage to his lyric-writing. He knew which vowels sing easily, which diphthongs were better avoided if the note was


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high; he was acutely aware of avoiding clusters of difficult-to-sing consonants; he would consciously leave an open vowel at the end of a song so that it might be given a held note. He had studied the great lyricists and could quote them effortlessly and at great length. More: he knew how they were set to music and what qualities made them settable. He knew his craft thoroughly. I want to expatiate a little on the matter of craft, and of knowing how great artists have dealt with problems similar to one’s own. Two wonderful instances: Igor Stravinsky, before setting to the business of writing a piano sonata, learnt all of Beethoven’s, a corpus unsurpassed; and before writing Fawlty Towers, which contains probably the greatest and most sustained farcical writing of the last century, John Cleese and his wife read every farce they could lay their hands on (and quite unashamedly pinched some of the best and funniest ideas). Nick knew his craft in this way. Because they came so easily to him, I think Nick underrated his lyrics. He is one of few lyricists of the last thirty and more years who deserve mentioning in the same breath as the great Stephen Sondheim. Consider his ‘Tango d’Amour’: “The French know love and its history/And the fever of vivre l’amour/But when they dance each night to its mystery/One fatal rhythm is with ’em on the floor etc’. The mastery of internal rhyme is effortless, and it continues throughout the song: “what’s better to set a heart ablaze”, “smooth as satin that Latin Quarter craze”, “invites them, delights them”, and so on. My feeling is that whatever might be the final verdict on his playwriting, as a lyricist he is so far ahead of the others that daylight is second. (And not just Australian lyricists.) There are Australian words and expressions that have been lying in wait for a witty lyricist to bring them together: “blowflies” and “crow flies” (‘Jindyworoback’); “track is hard” and “knacker’s yard” (‘Show Ponies’); “How does that song go?/Every man’s a drongo” (‘You Might Miss the Mongrel’). In ‘1962’ he piles on rhymes for “busy”, each of them repeated: “dizzy”, “is he?”, “tizzy”, and all this not just for the hell of it, or to show off, but because of what Fran needs to sing; and it is all done without strain. He enjoyed setting himself such technical tasks, and I enjoyed finding the musical equivalents. He tended to dismiss ‘Except’ (from Twins), unfairly I think. “There is no-one that I love and honour more/ Except …”: Florindo keeps punctuating his conventional expressions

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of brotherly love with different two-syllable doubts, each of which I set as a falling major seventh. The result, I think, is one of our most successful marriages; certainly one that I am proudest of. Nick was a joy to collaborate with, though he was not always easy; but then he, too, was working with an often difficult collaborator. He was the occasion of some of the happiest moments, and some of the most fulfilling achievements, of my life. He was my making as a song-writer. My last words to him, as he lay in the bed, in which he would within three days be dead, were: ‘You have given me such joy, such joy.’ He smiled.

Appendix Works by Nick Enright Books (playscripts) On the Wallaby (Sydney: Currency Press, 1982). Daylight Saving (Sydney: Currency Press, 1990). St James Infirmary (Sydney: Currency Press, 1993). A Property of the Clan (Sydney: Currency Press, 1994). Mongrels (Sydney: Currency Press, 1994). Good Works (Sydney: Currency Press in association with Playbox Theatre Centre, 1995). Blackrock (Sydney: Currency Press, 1996). Blackrock: Original Screenplay (Sydney: Currency Press, 1997). Cloudstreet (adaptation) (Sydney: Currency Press in association with Company B Belvoir and Black Swan Theatre, 1999). Summer Rain (Sydney: Currency Press, 2001). Spurboard (Sydney: Currency Press, 2001). A Man With Five Children (Sydney: Currency Press, 2003).

Playscripts (in edited collections) Good Works extract in Carey, Dean (ed.) The Actor’s Audition Manual: Vol. 1 (Sydney: Currency Press, 1988). A Property of the Clan extract in Carey, Dean (ed.) The Actor’s Audition Manual: Vol. 1 (Sydney: Currency Press, 1988). Blackrock extract in Carey, Dean (ed.) The Actor’s Audition Manual: Vol. 1 (Sydney: Currency Press, 1988). Mrs Sonenberg in Balodis, Janis and Deidre Rubenstein (eds) Confidentially Yours (Sydney: Currency Press/Playbox Theatre, 1998). Fleur in Balodis, Janis and Deidre Rubenstein (eds) Confidentially Yours (Sydney: Currency Press/Playbox Theatre, 1998).

Play productions Buckley's: An Entertainment With Music – And Politics, Adelaide, 1981. First Class Women, Sydney, New Theatre, 1982. Daylight Saving, Ensemble Theatre, Sydney 1989. St James Infirmary Blues, Parade Theatre, National Institute of Dramatic Art, Sydney, 1990. Mongrels, Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, 1991. St James Infirmary, Q Theatre, Penrith, New South Wales, 1992.

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A Property of the Clan, Freewheel Theatre-in-Education, Newcastle, New South Wales, 1992. Good Works, Q Theatre, Penrith, New South Wales, 1994. The Quartet from Rigoletto, Q Theatre/Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, 1995. Blackrock, Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney, 1995. The Way I Was, Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney, 1995. Playgrounds, Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney 1996. The Female Factory, Theatre Nepean, Sydney, 1997. Chasing the Dragon, Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney, 1998. Five Sevens, Perth, 1998. A Man With Five Children, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Sydney, 1998; Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney, 2002 (professional premiere). Spurboard, Australian Theatre for Young People, Sydney, 1999. A Poor Student, Marion Street Theatre, Sydney, 2001. Country Music, National Institute of Dramatic Art, Sydney, 2002.

Musicals The Venetian Twins (Goldoni), Nimrod, Sydney Theatre Company, 1979. On the Wallaby, State Theatre Company of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980. Variations, Nimrod, Sydney, 1982. Summer Rain, National Institute of Dramatic Art, Sydney, 1983. Orlando Rourke, Adelaide Festival Centre Theatre, Sydney, 1985. Strange Harvest, Adelaide Festival Centre Theatre, Sydney, 1985. The Betrothed, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Perth, 1993. Miracle City, Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney, 1996. The Voyage of Mary Bryant, Sydney, 1998. The Boy from Oz, Gannon Fox Productions, Sydney, 1998. The Good Fight, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Perth, 2002.

Music theatre and dance Music Is, Adelaide Chamber Orchestra, Adelaide, 1981. Fatal Johnny, Australian Dance Theatre, Adelaide, 1982. Snow Queen, South Australia Opera Company, Adelaide, 1985. Carnival of the Animals, Peter and the Wolf, Sydney, 1989.

Translations Electra (Sophocles) with Frank Hauser, Melbourne Theatre Company, Melbourne, 1978. The Servant of Two Masters (Goldoni) with Ron Blair, State Theatre Company of South Australia, Adelaide, 1978. King Stag (Gozzi) State Theatre Company of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980. The Marriage of Figaro (Beaumarchais) Lighthouse Company, Adelaide, 1980. Don Juan (Molière) State Theatre Company of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984. Trojan Women (Euripides) ABC Radio, 1989. Pericole (Offenbach) Australian Opera, 1993.

Appendix: Works by Nick Enright

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Stage adaptations Oh, What a Lovely War (Littlewood), State Theatre Company of South Australia, Adelaide, 1979. Bobbin Up, (Hewett) National Institute of Dramatic Art, Sydney, 1993 Cloudstreet (Winton) with Justin Monjo, Belvoir Street Theatre/Blackswan Theatre, Sydney, 1998.

Motion pictures/screenplays The Maitland and Morpeth String Quartet, animated film based on the book, 1989. Breaking Through, screen adaptation of the book No Longer a Victim by Cathy-Ann Mathews, 1990. Lorenzo's Oil, with George Miller, 1992. Blackrock, screenplay adapted from stage play, 1997. Bennelong, 2002 (incomplete).

Television Come in Spinner, with Lissa Benyon, adaptation of the novel by F. James and D. Cusack, ABC, 1990. ‘Coral Island’, an episode of the Naked series, ABC, 1996.

Radio The Maitland and Morpeth String Quartet, ABC, 1979. A Ship Without a Sail, ABC, 1985. The Snow Queen, ABC, 1985. Don Juan, ABC, 1987. Watching Over Israel, ABC, 1990.

Short stories ‘Crystal’, in String of Pearls: Stories about Cross-Dressing, edited by Tony Ayres (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996), pp. 97–114. ‘Madeleine’, in Aitken, Graeme (ed.) The Penguin Book of Gay Australian Writing (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 2002), pp. 194–206.

Essays ‘Collaboration and Community’ (based on the Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture), Australasian Drama Studies 42 (April 2003): 14–25. ‘Nick Enright: Confessions of a Library Cadet’, National Library of Australia News 9(9) (June 1999): 11–14.

Poetry The Maitland and Morpeth String Quartet, (Sydney: David Ell Press, 1980). Carnival of the Animals: Verse to Accompany the Grand Zoological Fantasia of Camille Saint-Saëns (Sydney: ABC Enterprises, 1990).

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Papers The papers of Nicholas Enright are held at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) Library in Canberra. The finding aid to this collection may be located at: http://www.lib.adfa.edu.au/speccoll/finding_aids/enright_nick.html

Nick Enright: An Actor's Playwright. (Australian Playwrights, Vol. 12)

Genesis of an American Playwright

The Playwright

Men at Play: Masculinities in Australian Theatre since the 1950s. (Australian Playwrights Monograph)

Nick

Mars, Vol. 12

Organic viticulture an Australian manual

Shakespeare in an Hour (Playwrights in an Hour)

To Be a Playwright

Contemporary American Playwrights

Samolot transportowy An-12

The Grantville Gazette Vol. 12

2013 Vol.56 No.12

The Actors

Saint Nick

Intergalactic Nick

Nick Stone

Intergalactic Nick

Saint Nick

Games for Actors and Non--Actors

Notable Playwrights (Magill's Choice)

Essential Australian Law (Australian Essentials)

An Australian Christmas in New York

The Minefield: An Australian Tragedy in Vietnam

An Introduction to International Relations: Australian Perspectives

An Anthology Of Australian Verse [Anthology]

An Australian Christmas in New York

Semiconductors and Semimetals, Vol. 12: Infrared Detectors II (v. 12)

An Incident On Route 12

Antonov An-12 in detail

On Actors and Acting

Nick Enright: An Actor's Playwright. (Australian Playwrights, Vol. 12)

Genesis of an American Playwright

The Playwright

Men at Play: Masculinities in Australian Theatre since the 1950s. (Australian Playwrights Monograph)

Nick

Mars, Vol. 12

Organic viticulture an Australian manual

Shakespeare in an Hour (Playwrights in an Hour)

To Be a Playwright

Contemporary American Playwrights

Samolot transportowy An-12

The Grantville Gazette Vol. 12

2013 Vol.56 No.12

The Actors

Saint Nick

Intergalactic Nick

Nick Stone

Intergalactic Nick

Saint Nick

Games for Actors and Non--Actors

Notable Playwrights (Magill's Choice)

Essential Australian Law (Australian Essentials)

An Australian Christmas in New York

The Minefield: An Australian Tragedy in Vietnam

An Introduction to International Relations: Australian Perspectives

An Anthology Of Australian Verse [Anthology]

An Australian Christmas in New York

Semiconductors and Semimetals, Vol. 12: Infrared Detectors II (v. 12)

An Incident On Route 12

Antonov An-12 in detail

On Actors and Acting

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