The Great Man
\nby David Williamson<\/p>\n
State Theatre Company
\nDunstan Playhouse
\nMay, 2002<\/p>\n
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n
David Williamson has an excellent instinct for currency. Not the folding kind, although his present London show won\u2019t be doing his wallet any harm. I mean the currency of ideas and manners, the zeitgeist writ large, small or merely fashionable. He has done the professions, he has splendidly done footy, he has looked at the etiquette of wealth, or at least of not having enough, he has had a swipe at the postmodern academy. Very recently he has hit the book pages and, with Madonna in the West End, he has given the art market a pollocking. <\/p>\n
He is also a long-time watcher of politics. Don\u2019s Party, capturing Don and his mates on the eve of the 1969 Labor victory which didn\u2019t happen, is a seventies classic set in the sixties. With its antler rattling and surly repartee it is a snapshot of middle class self-admiration and disappointment as well as a raucous celebration of the readiness with which Australians can shrug off setbacks and snuggle into compromise. Williamson plays are uncouth Chekhov. No other writer for our stage gets that. Or even come close. <\/p>\n
Written in 1999, The Great Man is an epilogue to Don\u2019s Party. Set thirty years later, it signals the end of the influence of the Whitlam era. Gough Whitlam\u2019s actual time in office was quixotic and short but it remains for many Australians, including me, a rallying point of idealistic action and national possibility. Its agenda was carried on the wave of the sixties held back a decade. It wasn\u2019t just Time, it was Overdue. The period of the Hawke and Keating administrations – five consecutive terms in all – is in so many ways much more politically impressive in its durability and competence, but its inevitable pragmatism was also, as was Labour at the same time in New Zealand, a key platform for privatisation and globalised economic rationalism. <\/p>\n
In The Great Man, David Williamson makes no bones about how much he hates where we presently are. Rarely have his feelings been closer to the surface and, in the program notes, for instance, he openly castigates Labor\u2019s failure of nerve on the refugee issue in the last election, and the consequent tweedledum-tweedledee nature of contemporary politics.<\/p>\n
Jack Barclay, a Whitlam minister who also served in the Hawke and Keating ministries, has just died. His second wife Fleur, aware that the funeral and the tributes spoken will be widely reported, has gathered the various speakers together to give posterity a nudge, as well engineer a bit of copy editing. Eileen the abandoned first wife is there, as is Rhys Rogers, a current Labor shadow minister. An ambitious young journalist Tegan Kowalska, who had been writing a profile of Barclay, joins them, as does Terry Kavanaugh, a painter friend from the early seventies. Circling the group like Kostya in The Seagull is Adam, Barclay\u2019s son in his late teens.<\/p>\n
In State Theatre\u2019s production, director Sarah Carradine has a challenge with what is essentially a very static play. Williamson has solved his strong first act, weaker second act problem by dispensing with a second act altogether, save for the arrival of a messenger announcing an offshore jackpot in the form of Barclay\u2019s unofficial will. The stand and deliver style is not in itself impossible, after all it worked for Bernard Shaw and even that chap Shakespeare. But here there is a mechanical baton change from one speech to the next that gets all too predictable.<\/p>\n
Designer Dean Hills set doesn\u2019t help either. A large, somewhat dishevelled wall sized bookshelf (uncharacteristic of the prim widow Fleur I would have thought) features Terry\u2019s Pugh-like portrait of the Great Man while a sloping wall of louvre windows looks out on a splodgy landcape painting which I presume is the splodgy landcape itself. In his program note Hills says he has resisted his \u201cvast knowledge of 70s tackydom \u201c in the design but, as in other instances, he can\u2019t help himself, and, in turn, it doesn\u2019t help us. It certainly doesn\u2019t help the actors when the designer says he wants to \u201cmake the environment uncomfortable for the characters.\u201d A barney is a barney whether it happens in a foyer or a group of club lounges.<\/p>\n
The performances are uneven, not only in quality but in style. Kate Roberts as Fleur has the brittleness of the First Mourner but at times a diffidence and lack of edge that the role suggests. Noel Hodda\u2019s blustery Labor careerist Rhys lacks shading but that is also in the writing – and no-one can negotiate the hundred kilometre u-turn he makes as he exits, determined to renew the pledges of Whitlam Labor.<\/p>\n
Anna Steen as Tegan and Jacqy Phillips as Eileen are close to caricature – Steen\u2019s costume is all cleavage and Britney midriff as she spouts an over-familiar ( and frankly, unfair) Gen X mix of ambition and low cunning, and while Phillips gets the laughs with a gin and tonic rasp and some gammy-hip stage parading , director Carradine is leading us perilously close to Commedia dell Arte. Cameron Goodall as Adam looks hard for the right combination of sulk and self-realisation and Phillips, with more to work with in the text, shares some good exchanges with him . <\/p>\n
Roger Newcombe\u2019s late entrance as Dick O\u2019Keefe the dodgy lawyer handling Barclay\u2019s secret bank is also doomed to one-dimensionality as one by one the characters are tempted to put (and therefore leave) their money where their mouth is. It is only Bob Hornery as the falstaffian Terry Kavanaugh who manages to fuse the broad outlines of the character with some emotional and intellectual substance.<\/p>\n
One reason for the fact that his is the best performance is that Williamson has also given him the best lines. The playwright is grappling with a huge subject here and it needs a lot more than a ninety minute gabfest to unravel it. But what I like about The Great Man, for all its gestures and cardboard formulae, is that when Williamson writes about the imagination and presents the gusto of Terry\u2019s commitment to the celebration of art, irreverent conviviality and earthy pleasure, he is speaking, in the Dunstan Playhouse no less, about something very central to the Australian character. And something in politics, as in all aspects of our lives, that can make great men – and women – of us yet. <\/p>\n
\u201cGreat and Small\u201d The Adelaide Review, No225, June, 2002, p.19.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Great Man by David Williamson State Theatre Company Dunstan Playhouse May, 2002 Reviewed by Murray Bramwell David Williamson has an excellent instinct for currency. Not the folding kind, although his present London show won\u2019t be doing his wallet any harm. I mean the currency of ideas and manners, the zeitgeist writ large, small or merely fashionable. He has done the professions, he has splendidly done footy, he has looked at the etiquette of wealth, or at least of not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,16,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","category-australian-texts","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":757,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions\/757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}