1990
Capricornia
by Xavier Herbert
Adapted for the stage by Louis Nowra
State Theatre Company
Playhouse, September, 1990
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
In his 1938 saga, Xavier Herbert used Capricornia as the name for Australia’s Top End. But it is not just a fictional geography , it is also a mythic one. In a profusion of storylines the novel tells how the half-caste Nawnim/ Norman Shillingsworth seeks identity not in two worlds but in three. On the brink of Asia, Port Zodiac (Darwin) represents all points on the compass and a racial mix of Europe, Asia and indigenous Australia.
In adapting Capricornia for the stage as part of the 1988 Bicentenary playwright Louis Nowra acknowledges the timeliness of its ethnic issues and the strength of its narrative but fifty years have not been kind to Herbert’s novel. It is a period piece whose language and technique mask Herbert’s progressive concerns. It is possible to read the same sort of racial determinism and historical fatalism into Capricornia that you might find in the writings of the Old South – miscegenation, mistaken identity, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and all.
The State Theatre Company in making Capricornia a wide screen epic on the Playhouse mainstage not only sacrifice what would have been the intimacy of the original Belvoir Street version but highlight the unwieldiness of the text. After a ritualistic opening with gamelan, conches and a giant Javanese puppet, director Kingston Anderson moves straight on to Louis Nowra’s narrative treadmill. The storyline has all the hallmarks of the mini-series – short, naturalistic episodes and convoluted plotlines. Nowra has focused and simplified the events of the novel but he has not made theatre of them. His play is overwritten and overlong with scenes such as those at the opening of Act II showing Norman and then Oscar Shillingsworth separately in desolation, wordy to the point of bathos.
Kingston Anderson has not found fresh ways of integrating music and performance – diverse cultural influences are asserted but they remain self-conscious decoration and no match for the predominantly melodramatic action. Anderson worked with Peter Brook for the rehearsals of The Mahabharata and useful influences are evident but he and Nowra haven’t gone far enough. Faced with a large story, Brook not only got himself a storyteller, the poet Vyasa, he also used a counter-narrator,Ganesh. Capricornia needs some kind of similar displacement device to sharpen issues and spare us tiresome dollops of plot.
Shaun Gurton’s cycloramic design is cavernous with a backdrop of scrunched alfoil and gradations of browns and ochres like a huge geological sample. This is your heartless sunburnt country but it’s symbolic value is destroyed by the fact that the play itself is a prosaic telemovie. Like the opening tableau the set itself is an unintegrated idea which succeeds in making exits and entrances interminable but gives no resonance to the production as theatre.
With what seem to be insurmountable conceptual production difficulties the performers find variable success. It is uncomfortable to see an actor of Bill McCluskey’s ability having to writhe about digging for demons with a page and a half too much dialogue, even Syd Brisbane was working overtime to kickstart Frank McLash. As Norman, Bradley Byquar ebbs and flows with the text and production pace -which is sepulchrally slow- but finds delicacy and strength particular in the final sections. His `rebirthing’ scene with the memorable Justine Saunders is a powerful one but also a reminder that while the production gestures at the idea of ritual and psychodrama it fails to derive strength and purpose from it.
As Tocky O’Cannon, Lydia Miller has real vivacity although the character itself has the unintended impact of sentimental stereotype- ambiguities that neither playwright or director have addressed fully enough. John Turnbull, Carmel McGlone and Darren R. Yap contribute strongly but at best none of the performances can work as more than damage control.
At a time when new Australian material is hard to find in the theatre, Capricornia is a disappointment -especially because it raises thematic and theatrical questions and then proceeds to ignore them. Louis Nowra and Kingston Anderson took on a formidable task so the stakes were high- but I can’t help feeling that, like Norman, they lost the farm.
“Unhappy Wanderings” The Adelaide Review, No.81, October, 1990, p.36.