Hating Alison Ashley
by Richard Tulloch
Magpie Theatre Company South Australia
Directed by: Robert Draffin
Design: Julie Lynch
Cast: Eileen Darley, Annabel Giles, Michelle
Stanley, Claudia La Rose, Joanna Cooper, Michael
Habib, Peter Wood.

It seems that everyone has been hating Alison Ashley lately. Within the space of two weeks Richard Tulloch’s play has been staged in Sydney, Canberra and by the Magpie Theatre Company in Adelaide. Tulloch has adapted Robin Klein’s popular novel about big changes at Barringa East Primary School when Alison Ashley, the new girl from the posh part of Hedge End Road crosses destinies with local hero, Erica Yurken, otherwise known as Yurk.

Alison Ashley the omnicompetent, Alison Ashley the pristine and Alison Ashley the decorous all have Yurk in a paroxysm of self-doubt. No slouch herself, she has been used to being the numero one at Barringa. She is having to learn to move over at home as well. Big sister Valjoy is making tidal waves, brother Harley is disdainfully perfecting Advanced Cool and Yurk’s solo mum is being driven into a romantic spin by Lennie the truckie.

Despite her well-heeled little goody two-shoes Alison Ashley’s life glistens but is not gold. Her mother is too busy running a restaurant to keep track of school events and the big house at Hedge End is forbiddingly prim. Yurk and Alison envy each other and Tulloch touchingly captures the over-anxious efforts of two kids desperate for peer approval.

There is also the usual comedie humaine of the schoolyard – bespectacled Margaret Collins, Diane Harper, Oscar and The Difficult Boy, Barry Hollis, representing that frog-snail-andpuppy- dog-tail machismo which has become reflexively de rigueur in TIE productions. Now that we have got over stereotyping of girls in youth theatre it might be time to let boys be more like boys as well. They don’t all have to wear beanies and talk like sub-normal footy commentators.

Director Robert Draffin has given the players opportunities for vigorous performance and with Julie Lynch’s chirpy, cardboard cut-out sets in smartie-bright primary colours, the production has an engaging Ginger Meggs feel about It. As Yurk, Eileen Darley is convincingly confident and vulnerable while Annabel Giles’s Alison is nicely poised between satire and pathos – it is her best work for a while. Michael Habib breathes real life into Barry Hollis in a creditably disciplined performance, also one of his best. Claudia La Rose is droll as Margaret Collins and Joanna Cooper and Peter Wood make an amusingly earnest pair of teachers. Wood is also gently understated as Lennie the truckie with a heart as big as a Mack.

But while Draffin creates an affectionate balance of comedy and serious intention, Tulloch’s play, particularly in Act II, dissipates its purpose. The play-within-the-play held at the school camp gets bogged in slapstick and proves an insufficient focus for Yurk’s moment of truth : that she doesn’t have to be good at everything.

A playwright like David Holman can make such a crisis both poignant and ethically satisfying but Tulloch can’t get the same fulcrum and Hating Alison Ashley founders when the hospital play of the rude mechanicals becomes merely rudely mechanical. Draffin is not to be blamed for letting the play’s humour get as broad as a bus (although the nurse’s balloon bustline was verging on Benny Hill) but it suggests that, in Hating Alison Ashley, the playwright himself doesn’t trust the simple strengths of his story of loyalties, tested and proven, as much as he should.

“Hating Alison Ashley”, Lowdown Vol.10, No.3, June/July, 1988, p.64.