1841
by Michael Gow
State Theatre Company
Playhouse

Theatre commissions are a bit like cargo cults. Titles are announced, brochures printed, runways are built and everybody waits for the play to land triumphantly. Except that, more often than not, it either overshoots the tarmac or pancakes unceremoniously in the midst of consternation and disbelief.

When the State Theatre Company secured the services of Michael Gow to write a play for the 1988 Adelaide Festival with additional support from the Bicentennial Authority (in the form of prestige and a wheelbarrow full of money) it was undoubtedly a coup.

Gow’s plays Away and Europe have received justifiable praise and the opportunity of a major commission honours a genuine theatrical talent. But 1841 should have been 1815 because this time Gow has met his Waterloo.

Gow’s narrator, Aurora, is the spirit of European revolutionary enlightenment come to Australia in 1841, the year nothing happened. Gow’s history is one that should have happened and never happened. Instead of Aurora’s vision of a new future, the worst of the past came from Over There to pillage, murder and founder in cynicism and defeat.

Aurora is a beacon to Mercy, a young woman in service seeking a new way, and Lynch, a convict ready to make new beginnings. Some like Sullivan have survived ordeals with decency intact, other such as Williams and Doyle are corrupt beyond redemption.

There are clear moral and historical symmetries in Gow’s play but they don’t get beyond diagrams on graph paper. As narrative it is scattered to the point of incompetence, as theatre it is intolerably dull.

Robert Kemp’s quirky design does nothing to anchor Gow’s disconnected whimsies. Actors rise lugubriously from trapdoors in the centre of the stage, tiny props of ships and houses inadequately suggest displacements of scale. Stumps in the forest look like a set for a hobbit musical and some of the costumes look like they’ve fallen off the back of the Mardi Gras. If this style had a name it would be High Kemp.

Brett Guerin’s music is New Age for old but in combination with Gow’s orotund rhetoric the effect is often ponderous.

The actors look plainly uncomfortable. Gillian Jones as Aurora opens with a prologue which is a mixture of T.S. Eliot and Leviticus – “My failure fills my mouth, despair stuffs my throat like sand, defeat strangles me.” It sounds all well and good but Gow uses such speeches to plug the play like polyfilla.

Others fare no better. Heather Mitchell as Mercy stands bravely in yet another theatrical waste land which has no place either in life or the imagination. John Gaden pulls out some comic turns from his bag of tricks to little avail and Steven Vidler as Lynch is hanged if he can make it work either.

Don Barker and Barbara West give lustreless, bewildered performances and when Patrick Frost appears on stage in modern dress, taking tourist snaps of a convict graveyard and doing a xerox of his performance in Away, then we know that the play has disappeared up something very fundamental indeed.

As directors, Gaden and Gow have let this scrappy saga drag at sepulchral speed in the belief that the rhythms of the language will galvanise the audience with its Seriousness of Purpose. They don’t. In fact dragooned matriculation candidates were snickering audibly and those more polite prayed for a fire drill.

It is disastrous that such a silly play should be STC’s Festival entry, especially since Stephen Sewell’s Dreams in an Empty City represented such a courageous choice in 1986. Michael Gow in his attempt to define his work against the costume dramas and convict soapies that have addled film and TV audiences for the last five years, has found nothing of substance to offer.

In its capricious, politically shallow gesturing 1841 is neither effectively against the past nor about it. But one thing is for sure – in its present or any other form, it is certainly history.

“Shallow” The Adelaide Review,No.49, March, 1988, p.30.