Don’s Party
An Audience with Don Dunstan
by Neil Cole.
Directed by Alicia Ben-Lawler.
Ayers House, North Terrace.
May 11. Until May 17.

Amongst the impressively diverse month-long program of the History Festival is a theatre cabaret work featuring one of South Australia’s most outstanding political leaders. Don Dunstan, who served as Member of the House of Assembly from 1953 to 1979, the last nine years as Premier , remains the most transformative single parliamentarian in South Australian history.

So former Victorian Labor MP, and now playwright, Neil Cole’s digressive and colourful portrait of Dunstan is a timely reminder – in a History Festival – of his enduring legacy. His Audience with the Don is a mix of anecdote, fond hagiography, and topical song as it zig-zags back and forth through Dunstan’s long and remarkable chronology.

The setting is late in the evening in an Adelaide café in 1996 – three years before Dunstan’s death at 72. He is alone at his table reminiscing, reflecting, and occasionally breaking into song. Across from him at the old-fashioned bar and bottle rack is the waitress Asiya (Ag Johnson), a young Somalian Moslem woman with aspirations as a cabaret singer.

In fact, she opens the show with a sly rendering of Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife” – initiating a suitably erudite, ever so pedantic gloss from Dunstan (Alec Gilbert) as to the origins, themes, and polemic intentions of Bertolt Brecht. The dialogue between the two strangers, drawn from vastly differing backgrounds and formative times, makes up much of the play. As Asiya pours generous servings of high-priced chardonnay (surreptitiously on the house) the former premier reflects on events – both triumphs and tribulations of a life on the political stage.

Comparisons are drawn between the theatre and the politics – sometimes rather too obviously. But Dunstan was a Footlights performer with Keith Michell at Adelaide Uni – and they did soft shoe their way through “A Couple of Swells” as hat and cane vaudevillians.

Asiya’s experience in multicultural Australia is significantly current. The response to her head scarf, her conflict with her parents about studying music and not law or medicine, her need to conceal her gay relationship – these all echo aspects of Dunstan’s own life as well as his observations of the earlier wave of Italian migrants (his much-loved neighbours in Norwood) who suffered similar stigmas in a previous era of change.

Much of the material Cole draws on comes from an ABC interview in 1972 and Dunstan’s clashes with an often hectoring and hostile press are satirically captured by Isabella Gilbert’s intermittent interruptions with her microphone, pushing for on the spot “gotchas” about the premier’s wildly successful cookbook, his much-criticised advocacy for military withdrawal from Vietnam, and his appearance in Parliament wearing his infamous pink shorts.

Cole admirably captures the courage and energy of Dunstan’s progressive reform both in modernising and enriching South Australian culture. From his outspoken criticism of the unsound evidence in the Max Stuart case in the 1950s to his clash with, and dismissal of, Police Commissioner Harold Salisbury, Dunstan stood his principled ground in way that seems improbable in the current era of mostly craven realpolitik.

Director Alicia Ben-Lawler has the challenge, in the grand but awkwardly configured confines of Ayers House, to keep Neil Cole’s ambitious mix of political narrative and musical interludes together- and most often the three performers succeed.

Ag Johnson is vivid as Asiya and delivers the Nina Simone and Billie Holiday material – “Sinner Man”, “Strange Fruit”- as well the haunting version of “Joe Hill “in the finale, with panache. Joined by Isabella Gilbert’s zany energy as the media interrogator and duetting on Country Joe and Fish’s anti-Vietnam chant the “Fixing to Die Blues”, they successfully navigate some occasionally perilous segues.

As the Don, the nicely-understated Alec Gilbert ably captures the suave assurance and insouciance of this mercurial man. His withering response to patent stupidity and earnest championing of non-negotiables – such as assuring Indigenous rights, decriminalising homosexuality, and calling for an end to the Playford gerrymander – all resonate. The poetry recitations of Wilfrid Owen and John Donne, while characteristic of this Renaissance man, perhaps sit rather uncomfortably in this ambitious mix.

But, for the enthusiastic audience for this Audience with Don Dunstan, it has been an eighty minute celebration of a remarkable career and– in this month of historical reflection – a lesson in what that “vision thing” can really mean.

murraybramwell.com