A Cheery Soul
by Patrick White
Queensland Theatre Company
Her Majesty’s
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
On the slowly spinning revolve Bill Haycock’s design could be a retro-chic lunch place. Patrick White’s meticulously described kitchen scene, in cream and red chrome and formica, once embodied the Australian Ugliness, the bland vulgarity of that early Sixties suburban Sydney he lumped together as Sarsaparilla. Now it is aestheticised, wry down-market decor, unable to harm or threaten- as it did White and the young male personae of his plays- those poets and sensitives buried alive in material comfort and spiritual dearth.
The satire in Act I of A Cheery Soul still registers. The Custances live like Dagwood and Blondie, a life of petty habit and compulsive domestic hygiene. Jennifer Flowers is nicely underplayed as the wife waiting for the invention of Spray and Wipe while Max Cullen, taking his Ham Funeral performance back a few notches, is weirdly generic as the fussy, denatured husband. Into their lives walks Miss Docker, savagely based on White’s acquaintance Miss Scott. Miss Falstaff, Signora Gloriosus, Mrs Malaprop, the Moonie Ponds Edna, she is the busybody, the invader of Personal Space, the blurter of confidences, the reminder that our lives are not our own.
A Cheery Soul is a bitter work and far from straight-forward in structure. After Miss Docker’s disastrous sojourn in the Custance house she moves awkwardly- as does the play- to the Sundown Home for Old People. From there we get a series of set pieces, vignettes of her with the ladies in the home, brittle as teacups, politely parked in the twilight zone. Elsewhere Miss Docker breaks the spirit and belief of the tortured cleric, mockingly named Wakeman.
Director Neil Armfield, after his gaudily expressionist version of The Ham Funeral has similarly heightened White’s symbolist reverie into a kind of gothic pantomime. His staging is spacious -in Victorian black back-dropped with funereal draperies. It is like Poe, or Munch on a larger scale. The whisperings of the ladies, the choric repetitions, the tetchiness of the not-yet dead forms a decor for the raucous Miss Docker.
Carole Skinner’s cheery solo is well-sustained. Her Miss Docker is a stock figure, a fixed entity whose effectiveness comes from its location in Armfield’s operatic vision. Geoff Morrell is nicely stylised as Wakeman and Jennifer Blocksidge excellent as the genteel Miss Lillie. The ensemble work has clarity and precision and Nigel Levings’ lighting is yet again first-rate.
Neil Armfield has taken the disunities of White’s play and amplified them into a visually commanding work. But unlike The Ham Funeral he has altered the proportions of the work. A Cheery Soul is an uncomfortable piece, gnarly and unresolved like its author. It is almost unreasonable in its rancour. It is also passionate in its denunciation of the time that produced it. Armfield’s directorial gifts have perhaps been too much abundance in this production. The fluency that he has found is admirable but the play is now an innocuous icon of another epoch. Rather than pleasing the eye Patrick White might have preferred that it stick in the throat instead.
The Adelaide Review, No.125, March, 1994, p.24.