1991
King Golgrutha
by Stephen Sewell
State Theatre Company
Playhouse, July 1991.
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
What has always distinguished Stephen Sewell is his wish to make theatre do things that most believe it can’t or shouldn’t do. When the collective concentration span is diminishing he writes plays that run till eleven thirty, when it is prudent to be ironic he offers unabashed earnestness. Sewell breaks rules almost as if he doesn’t realise they exist with the consequence that he has written some of most memorable plays in the past decade or so. Politically overt, emotionally flamboyant plays like The Blind Giant is Dancing and Dreams in an Empty city first made their mark on the Playhouse stage here in Adelaide. Vast, wordy, epic, unwieldy, they drew deeply divided responses. Some described them as the strongest plays they’d seen in this country, others, with equal conviction declared them the very worst.
Sewell’s latest work, King Golgrutha, commissioned by the State Theatre Company and directed by Simon Phillips, will create even more polarity. While earlier plays have been a discrepant mix of naturalistic and expressionist styles, this play, a black comedy -part Jarry’s Ubu, part Strindbergian dream play, part prosh revue -makes for a more unstable compound than ever.
The central figure Gutso is a fascinating creation even if the plotline of the play beggars description. A gargantuan tycoon he is more than an entrepreneurial bandit, he embodies every possible form of appetite. Surrounded by bizarre minders – Hunchback ,Pike and Russell- Gutso’s narcissistic wish becomes tyrannical demand. He is rich, powerful – and, true to cliche, full of grief. His opening soliloquoy confesses a lovelorn heart masquerading as a black one. Asset rich and cash poor, Gutso contrives a marriage to Lady Trollope to get funds back into his portfolio but already the the bankers are foreclosing, time and patience running out. Gutso, mightily fallen, turns to the wraith-like Golgrutha for wisdom and solace. Their dialogues form the ethical narrative of the play but Gutso’s destiny is already set.
King Golgrutha is a morality play set amidst moral insanity but Sewell has burdened it with more allusions, asides, pratfalls, sight gags and wisecracks than any production can bear. He has taken risks in the past but here he subverts his own best work either with dollops of bombast or kamikaze one-liners. Often the laughs are at the expense of any kind of dramatic momentum. It’s too arbitrarily weird to switch from mythic symbolism to Shakespearian pastiche to hoary Derryn Hinch jokes. What you get is a production graunching through the gears while actors take refuge in whatever business they can find.
As Gutso, Peter Dunn is valiant. A big fellow, he strides the stage like a West Australian Falstaff -but the big speeches with their bumpy rhythms defeat even his hefty lungs. His best scenes are those with Golgrutha, his unhappiest when he’s expected to be Larry and Moe. But Gutso is a powerful creation and Dunn manages to get enough lightning into Sewell’s monster for it to rise off the table. The large cast fare variously. Edwin Hodgeman’s Rocky Horror Hunchback, Michael Carman’s Dickensian Pike, Heather Bolton’s deadpan Misery and William McLusky’s Gloucester , the joke Scotsman, all provide some astute damage control. Jenny Castles is a strong Magdelene and newcomer Eva Hamburg manages to scuttle across the floors of silent seas as Sewell’s cryptic seafood cocktail, Golgrutha. Carmel McGlone as Lady Trollope faces a losing battle with ludicrous speeches on New Age crystals and Steven Vidler doesn’t stand a chance as the unfathomable Achilles.
Everywhere there is a sense that the production has grown by accretion. Between them, Sewell, director Phillips and dramaturg Julie Rose have failed to arrive at a workable script. Weak gags and spurious set pieces have regretably survived – when somebody in Act III says ‘let’s baptise the cat’ there is more than a passing sense that the centre cannot hold. Given the lumbering text the strategy has been embellishment and encrustation. Designer Shaun Gurton’s giant set has concrete slab sides with a perspex mezzanine held by a wonky column and a spiral staircase.Various statuary clutter the back of the stage area while at the front a shallow pond with a swivel chair serves Gutso for his solos and Golgrutha her lobster metamorphosis. Bronwyn Jones’s skilful costumes are diverting in their variety but share with much else in the production an accidental quality.
The lighting design by Mark Shelton is a departure from his usually judicious work – the luridly expressionist greens and reds seem almost cynically mechanical. As are many of Ian McDonald’s keyboard fills- scrollops of Phantom-like organ or synth sound effects keyed to the action like looney tunes.
Director Simon Phillips has presided over a production that has many of the ingredients of success but he has trusted too much in his flair for theatrical gloss. Sewell’s unshapely script is full of dramatic interest but it’s present draft is too capricious for success. King Golgrutha marks an uncertain departure into comedy for Stephen Sewell. Still he dares to reveal to us the dangerous banality of true feeling and the viciousness of our social structures and still he can write with poetic force but when he relinquishes the lyric grandeur of the earlier work for the grotesque panto of King Golgrutha the result is perilously close to a mess of pottage.
The Adelaide Review, No.91, August, 1991, pp.35-6.