Funerals and Circuses
by Roger Bennett
Music by Paul Kelly
Magpie Theatre, South Australia
Director: Steve Gration
Assistant Director: Kaarin Fairfax
Designer: Kathryn Sproul
Choreographer: Debra Batton
Lighting: Laraine Wheeler
Cast: Wayne Anthoney, Roger Bennett, Robert Crompton, Fille Dusseljee, Francis Greenslade, Michael Harris, Nick Hope, Paul Kelly, Kate Roberts, Mandi Sandilands, Lillian Sansbury, Simone Tur.

Rarely does a theatrical work speak to its audience as directly and potently as Funerals and Circuses. In the midst of the Adelaide Festival, with all its attendant sense of cultural consumption, is a play that is about our immediate reality. In the same week that ABC-TV created fierce public debate by screening Cop It Sweet, a documentary on police attitudes towards Aboriginals, and Mandawuy Yunupingu, lead singer of Yothu Yindi, was refused service in the Catani Bar in Melbourne’s St. Kilda, Funerals and Circuses presents us with a vivid account of racism in a South Australian community.

This play has not come out of nowhere. It continues and builds on a core of black writing in recent years begun by the powerful witness in Jack Davis’s work, plays by Bob Maza and Eva Johnson and the widespread and well-merited success of Bran Nue Dae. But Funerals and Circuses has learnt well from its antecedents and the process of its development has been a particularly creative one.

The setting is a small unidentified town where the lives of whites and Aboriginals are in daily, intimate encounter. This contributes much to the intensity of events – Nona, the daughter of the local cop Graham Royal, has married an Aboriginal, Ben Bean, which alienates not only the local whites but also Ben’s daughter Jessie. Ben’s sister Rose has a son, Joseph, a spirited youth who is often in conflict with official and unofficial white authority. Running the local bar on the best apartheid principles is Corey, while Pam McMahon and her racist tearaway son Kev operate the shop. Next door at the garage is Tony, friend to Ben and Joseph and therefore suspect as far as the white residents are concerned. The play, as the title suggests, begins with a wedding and ends in grief but it richly explores the attitudes and fears of the characters and in so doing brings the abstraction of racism into human terms.

Opening in promenade fashion, the crowd is invited to a madcap wedding celebrated with Paul Kelly’s nimble song Until Death Do Them Part. Having established a sense of frivolity, the vehemence of the racism -expressed when the guests are refused a nuptial drink at the local – cuts deep. The local cop is feckless, the white youths of the town homicidally out of control. A shadow falls over events when Rose fears her son Christopher is missing and Jessie decides to head out to a dreaming site just out of town. The play threads a complicated plot artfully, creating suspense and tension in the process.

Richard, a cousin from town, introduces a star-crossed theme when he quotes Romeo and Julietta Kev’s disillusioned girlfriend Julie. This theme of prejudice and vengeance imbues the play. It is the young who suffer most terribly – and the play does not stint in saying so.

Directors Steve Gration and Kaarin Fairfax have drawn fine performances particularly from the less experienced performers. There is a truth to their work which is powerfully eloquent. Writer Roger Bennett brings a shrewd comedy to the part of Ben Bean while Robert Crompton and Michael Harris are crucially convincing as Joseph and Richard. We experience vividly the vindictiveness with which they are treated. The desperate racism of Corey (Nick Hope) and Kev McMahon (Francis Greenslade) serve a key dramatic role in the play and Greenslade, in particular, contributes one of the finest stage performances. Wayne Anthoney as the cop skilfully epitomises the kind of easy-going approach to law enforcement which serves racism best while Lillian Sansbury and Simone Tur as Rose and Jessie, black women violated and betrayed by random violence, give performances which are precise, eloquent and harrowing in their detail.

Funerals and Circuses is unsparing in its depiction of injustice but it is also imbued with a radiant spirit. This is not in the form of easy sentiment but a sense of the unquenchable vitality of Aboriginal society and the careful protocol which unites it. Director Gration has maintained workable balances in the production , aided by a practical and appropriately detailed set, one of Kathryn Sproul’s best. The store fronts and shanties, petrol pumps and desert settings give specificity to the narrative and anchor the drama in an identifiable locale. Finally, mention must be made of Paul Kelly, gently offbeat as Tony and a vital contributor to the success of the show. His music – lyrical, slyly memorable and always shaped and integrated with the action – brings a kind of joy to the production. Funerals and Circuses is not an easy account of our times. It presents much to feel grief and shame for. But the simple gifts of Kelly’s Finale Song offer a kind of benediction that promises better. Not just because we wish it, but because good people have already striven for it.

“Funerals and Circuses” Lowdown, Vol.14, No.2, April 1992, p.55.