Malthouse Theatre
22 August 2019
Merlyn Theatre
to 8 September
 |
| "Australian Realness" Photo by Pia Johnson |
In 2011, someone* told me to see a play in a terrace in Fitzroy during the Melbourne Fringe and I was blown away at the original voices and capture of what it was like to be 20ish woman. One of the creators of I know there's a lot of noise outside but you have to close your eyes was Zoey Dawson. I think I've seen all of her significant plays since then; some (like Conviction and The Unspoken Word is Joe) have blown me away at their original voice and capture of what it's like to a theatre person in Melbourne.
Australian Realness is Dawson's first mainstage show at Malthouse. It begins as the kind of lets-laugh-very-gently-at-our-middle-class-selves-without-being-mean naturalistic comedy. It's set in 1997 and the blue-checked couch, Country Road dress, box of Moet, artichokes and hand-made wind chimes (design by Romanie Harper) are so recognisable that many of the audience will be pricing it in their heads and don't need the references to know it's in North Fitzroy. Goodness, it's so silly-us-in-the-90s-with-our-lovely-houses-reading-that-Tim-Winton-book-about-the-disabled-boy that it could be in that bigger theatre down the road.
But it's not that kind of play.
The family are mum, Linda Cropper; dad, Greg Stone; pregnant daughter, Emily Goddard; coke-head investor son, Andre De Vanny; and daughter's girlfriend from Coburg who is about to lose her job at the wharfs, Chanella Marci. The constant sound (James Paul sound design) of building new apartments next door threatens to ruin family Christmas, but there are secrets that are more dangerous.
It's really not this kind of play.
One secret is that the family money is running out, because no one is buying books or seeing puppet shows any more, and that the shed has been leased to a family of people from the suburbs; doubled by three of the cast. This fag-smoking mum wears a glitter reindeer t-shirt from K-Mart and this dad bonds with wharfy girlfriend because they are the only people who get that the blissful "I can hear the cockies at Merri Creek" silence from the building work stopping next door means that people have lost their jobs.
Bogans V what-Yuppies-grew-into. Australian cities and class. Did people living in huge-houses-near-good-schools know what was happening at the Melbourne wharfs in the late 90s and early 2000s?
When the classes clash, the so-familiar comedy twists into an Aussie sitcom complete with laugh track, talking to the audience and characters that are easy to laugh at because they are not us. And "they" don't go to the theatre, so they won't see it. It's easier to laugh than admit to fear.
And it's not that play either.
It's a what-if terrified imagining that the working class revolution happened. Or a dystopic time-shifting fantasy. Or a blood-soaked urban gothic horror dream. Or a jolt into now with a consensual live-art exhibition and cereal-milk pannacotta Masterchef jokes.
Last week, I was unsure about another play by a young writer on a mainstage because it tried to be too many things at one. This is similar, but is more successful because it changes tones tightly and every genre within the genre would be great by itself. Director Janice Muller ensures that the absurdly outrageous shifts in tone and story are surprising but feel so right in the theatre. The walls can come down in the theatre; we never have to imagine that we are really there. And Goddard remains the same character who was asleep on the couch at the beginning, ensuring there's always someone to consistently care about.
Australian Realness is far more than a safe poke at those who go to the theatre and make fun of bogans. It's a far sharper poke and no one knows the safe word to make it stop.
* Possibly Declan Greene, who has since worked with Zoey as a director and as dramaturg on Australian Realness. UPDATE: Yep, it was Dec.
