Rayson's Real Success
written by Kevin Summers, April 2005
Something really interesting happened in Victoria recently. A play opened in Melbourne & it caused a fuss. Of the scores of productions that pass for our annual theatrical output, the great majority sink without trace. A few may remain in the hearts of some performers or in the files of a critic or two but that's about it. (Mamma Mia, for our sins, returns biennially.)
Last week, however, we were treated to an outbreak of passion about a creative work that spread outside the parameters of the arts pages. Beyond deep divisions among the critics, editorials intoned, opinion pieces emerged (including the playwright's spirited defence), letters to the editor debated the play's merits, & talkback radio degenerated into its usual half-backed ramblings. It was very refreshing.
This is Hannie Rayson's great service in writing Two Brothers. Is it a good play? Helen Thomson in The Age thought Rayson had "skillfully condensed & dramatised a national narrative into a family drama" while the Sunday Age's Owen Richardson found that "the narrative implausibilities pile up & reinforce the air the play has of being a shrill, willful fantasy".
Is it well served? Thomson praised Simon Phillips' "crisp direction". Richardson wrote of his "not altogether sensitive direction". She praised the cast; he thought the performers struggled their way through the "impossible material".
While differences among critics are hardly unknown, they seldom diverge so profoundly over a major production. The play has also deeply divided audience members. Of those I have spoken to, some love it, others loathe it. None remain unmoved. While Rayson could construct a play loosely based on the charismatic, deceased historian Ian Turner (Life After George ) to almost total praise, it is a different matter to repeat the process on a man who may be our next Prime Minister & paint him as an exemplar of moral decadence.
Rayson has taken a knife to the dark heart of how we are governed & the blood is flowing. She is taking some wounds too but that doesn't matter. At this moment Victoria is a stimulating place - & it has nothing to do with the footy, the Games no one wanted or the GP in the park. It's about ideas & imagination & political commitment ... with a cast to die for: the celebrated playwright, the critics at loggerheads, angry broadsheet & tabloid journalists, radio shock-jocks & perceptive letter writers. We have vitriol, fulmination, accusation & vindication. We have goodies & baddies.
All this in a state where its most innovative director, Barrie Kosky, sought a measure of fulfillment in Vienna & its finest young playwright, Ben Ellis, is about to live for some time in the United States. Through Two Brothers we have, perhaps for a short time only, moved tentatively toward German dramatist Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre, where the audience, rather than being involved in a theatrical situation, is made to face a socio-political issue. The theatre arouses the viewers' capacity to act.
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