The Daylight Atheist
By Tom Scott

State Theatre Company
Sydney Theatre Company co-production
The Space

Murray Bramwell

A daylight atheist, New Zealand playwright Tom Scott tells us, is someone who doesn’t believe in God until it gets dark. Dan Moffat, the dominant of many voices in Scott’s monodrama, is a man for whom the night is closing in. An Irish emigrant to New Zealand after the end of the war in 1945, Moffat is followed by his wife and infant children. He only ever calls her Dingbat, just as his eldest son is only ever referred to as Egghead. Moffat is a clown, a bully, a drunk, a disgrace as a father, and a staunch friend to his Maori mate Jack. He defies authority – whether the Air Force, the meat works or his son’s English teacher – but is a coward with a stammer when faced with his equal. He is a clever wit, but a cruel one, a man with ability, squandered in mean-spiritedness and self-loathing.

Writer, Tom Scott, a celebrated humorist and cartoonist, has constructed a portrait bearing strong resemblance to his own father, and the Egghead in question is, in part, a painful self-portrait. At the same time, this text is riddled with artifice, with a torrent of jokes, gags, aphorisms, tall tales and vaudeville turns. For the actor this is a daunting mix of substance and blather. The role of Dan – and the voices from his past and alienated present – needs bursts of energy for the wordy exposition and quieter shading for the grim and lonely figure he has become.

In casting Max Cullen many choices have been made about Dan Moffat – and Adam Cook’s direction confirms this. Cullen has brought his distinctive appeal to dozens of roles. David Williamson wrote Sons of Cain for him, we have seen him in Cloudstreet and The Ham Funeral. The common feature in his performances is a sardonic wit, but it is also a genial one. Max Cullen embodies the good bloke – and, whatever else he is, Dan Moffat is not one of them.

Cullen’s performance gets right on to Scott’s capering comedy and makes it work even when the jokes are hoary. But Moffat is a stage Irishman, a hollow man who can hold the floor but can’t communicate. He belittles his wife and persecutes his children. He is a vicious old lag, one of a generation of men who locked themselves in and their families out. His house is the image of his predicament – holed up in one room, he lives in a state of siege. Dean Hills’s ramshackle décor is too amply expansive. This is not the place for Francis Bacon’s creative tilth, it is a pinched, Beckettian man, trapped in his shabby little castle, lobbing derision over the wall to a family that has finally found a way of standing up to his bullying.

Tom Scott may be writing about matters that are close to the bone for him, but the tragedy of this family’s disintegration is a common tale and a recognizable one. In his Green Room Award-winning performance as Moffat for the Melbourne Theatre Company, Richard Piper went a lot further into the bleakness of this play than Max Cullen has here. Cullen makes us laugh and spins the lines, and has a dozen codger’s looks to win us over, but he doesn’t give us Dan Moffat as the blarney turns to ash in his mouth.

“Cullen Fails to Cull” The Adelaide Review, No.278, September 30, 2005, p.18.