Maestro
By Anna Goldsworthy and Peter Goldsworthy
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide.
March 3. Tickets $45 – $60. Bookings BASS 131 246
Until March 11.

“What is the difference between good and great ?” Paul Crabbe, the eager boy pianist from Darwin keeps asking his enigmatic, Viennese trained teacher. “Not much” is his answer – “little bits.” Peter Goldsworthy’s masterful novel Maestro has intrigued readers since it first appeared twenty years ago and now, in collaboration with his daughter, musician and writer Anna Goldsworthy, he has adapted it for the stage.

For the many admirers of the novel, much has been recognizably retained – the damp and restrictive atmosphere (both culturally and meteorologically) of Darwin in the sixties, the pressures on a talented boy becoming alienated from his familiars as he discovers a world elsewhere. The conversations about art – especially from the Maestro, Eduard Keller – and its limitations in the face of history are well explored. As is the pleasure in music, now concentrated especially on the lieder and piano works of Schubert , and, in Paul’s flirtation with rock’n’roll, on Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog.

Dealing capably with a last minute transfer to Her Majesty’s after the Playhouse refit was delayed, director Martin Laud Gray, who worked with Goldsworthy previously on his zany comedy of ethics, Honk if You Are Jesus, has, with the use of the revolve and Mary Moore’s well-observed teak and tropical settings and Viennese back-projections, astutely managed the range of the narrative.

But, building on the shift to a broader style in the Goldsworthys’ text, he allows the comedy to become shrill. Hardly noted in the novel, the character Betty Rollo (admirably managed by Michaela Cantwell) is fully blown into a warbling sixties version of Kath Day-Knight, while Paul’s rocker chums Scotty and Jimmy (the valiant Tim Lucas and Joseph del Re) are given second-rate Fonzie schtick to deal with.

In a play which invites us to recognize and value nuance this heavy-handed cultural cringe sits uneasily against the central material which, already working well, needs no drastic shifts of mood or tone. Other characterisations fare better – Ellen Steele as the fresh young Rosie Zollo, and Kate Roberts and Geoff Revell as Paul’s parents. The versatile Revell is also memorable as the musician Henisch.

In the leads – as Paul, Luke Clayson is excellent as the unworldly but ambitious teenager inquisitively delving the hidden life of his teacher. As is Dennis Olsen as Keller, like the stricken father in Schubert’s The Earl King, frozen with guilt at the death of his son. Their scenes together are the heart of the play, and where the best writing is. The final scene especially, brings together that blend of thought and feeling, those “little bits” which take us from the good to something much greater.

Murray Bramwell

“In thrall to the master”, The Australian, March 5, 2009, p.10