The Secret Death of Salvador Dali
by Stephen Sewell

The Court of Miracles
Directed by Peter Dunn
Lion Theatre
Adelaide

“The difference between a madman and me”, Salvador Dali once said, “is that I am not mad.” More, you might say, crazy like a fox. The pre-eminent artist celebrity before Andy Warhol, Dali forms the link between the anti-bourgeois Dada comedy of Alfred Jarry and the zany popularity of the Marx Brothers. With his melting watches, lobster telephones and a moustache swiped from a Velasquez portrait of King Philip the Fourth, Dali epitomised the egotistical excesses of what the squares used to call Modern Art.

In his freewheeling account of the Catalan surrealist, playwright Stephen Sewell gives us Dali in extremis. The artist is on his death bed, his arms spread like the wingspan of an albatross. Designer Karla Urizar has created a corona of cauliflowers for his pillow, at the foot of the scarlet bedspread is a pool of dubiously brown body fluid. Sewell’s Secret Death, a variant on Dali’s own Secret Life, explores in flashbacks- and helpful slide shows of paintings- the sexually neurotic child of a syphilitic burgher, morbidly afraid of a brother, also named Salvador, who dies in infancy, and obsessed with ungovernable incestuous fantasies for his sister Anna Maria.

A procession of characters -all spiritedly played by Kate Kendall and Rory Walker- reveal the swirl of Dali’s unfettered foetid mind. We see his brutish father dressed like Pere Ubu, his virginal sister, his friendship with Garcia Lorca (cross-cast by Kendall) his squabbles with Bunuel and Breton. He is also visited by Freud in a bad beard, and has power fantasies of Hitler and Stalin. The players labour through unnumerable costume changes to reveal the comic excesses and lugubrious games of Dali as Narcissus and old Andalusian Dog, indifferent to the tragedies of World War Two, sponging on the freak circuit of American fame, cranking out canvases to bankroll the capricious lifestyle of his contemptuous wife Gala.

Sewell’s text is full of fascinating detail and jokey speculation but his subject is too rich for his own good. The nimble shifts between characters in Act One, with Kendall and Walker alternating roles-including Dali himself- get bogged in Act Two with a more prosaic account of the Dalis bickering in America. Director Peter Dunn also needs to peg back performances which increasingly mistake volume for intensity.

In The Secret Death of Salvador Dali, Sewell has taken a twentieth century decadent and given him a caning. But having made his Dali part Groucho, part Mr Punch there is no need for him to be visited, like the ghost of Christmas Past, by a kitsch vision of the painter Raphael, berating him as a turd and a traitor to his talent. The play has already done that. Sending Dali down the chute complete with hellfire reds and stage smoke is to end the play as hokey pantomime and oversimplify its debate. But Secret Death – poetic, prolix, deft, sometimes clunky- is, as ever with Stephen Sewell, singular and intriguing.

The Australian, Arts on Friday, June 13, 1997. p.14.