REVIEW: The Joy of Text (part 1)
(edit: I realise I broke off suddenly at the end there, so I’m turning this into part 1 — I’ll come back for part 2 later this week)
This is the extended remix of a review that was up at Time Out, in yore agan, where it was frilled with such perspicacious summings-up as “Christinson balances the clowning with emotional depth”, and arch facetiae such as “a topical script, brighter than a backlit 3DS”. Alas, these and like triumphs of ornament have been sacrificed for this primitive review-remount.
I was going to forgo the remix and simply paste up the original along with the two I posted below, Moth and A Golem Story, on both of which I’ve nothing further to add . But, as I crouch here in my shallow pit, conscious of the looming shadow of another big MTC launch tomorrow, a show I have no plans to see, being “off duty” for the weekend, I feel that peculiar catalytic transformation of passive indifference into active spite, or not quite spite, but a kind of obscure loathing, something motivating, whatever it is.
The Joy of Text is far and away the stand-out MTC production of the year to date; it’s probably the best main-stage drama I’ve seen at the state’s “peak” theatre company since Season at Sarsaparilla. Admittedly, it is much less great that Season, and some of the off-the-main-stage Studio productions might also come close to eclipsing it (perhaps even one of the Studio shows play right now), but in terms of the impression it made as a coherent and engaging dramatic argument classically composed with an audacious critical reflexivity, which is the measure I’m using here for “best”, this was surprisingly inspiring.
I’m using this dull-sounding measure not because I think it is in any way an ideal standard, but because under Simon Phillip’s artistic direction it has been the only standard even almost within the MTC’s grasp. That has been the narrow aim of all their artistic ambition, the sole ground on which it could be argued that they have pursued the disruptive, novel, absolutely unknowable truth which is art.
But the regularity with which the company, in programming and production, shies from even this modest aspiration, abandoning even this modest climb to the mere foothills of artistic ambition, makes wonder whether I’m not being overly generous in ascribing an artistic direction at all. Surveying the prease of “reputable” plays the MTC has, these past several seasons, imported from distant “boulevards”, from those French, American and British corners where something called “success” is said to be decided (stare decisis, Melbourne), and, too, the work of that fixed constellation of local main-stage playwrights, over whose popular election as culture-heroes enough keyboards have already been dashed, I can make out only the vaguest of aspirations.
Could anything but a coffee-table history, lushly photographed of course, be written about the last ten-years at the MTC? Would it be possible to synthesise an artistic project?
But I try not to be cynical! No, vague as it is, there is evidence of a higher aspiration, of an ambition toward, or rather call it a tendency, a tendency toward coherent and engaging dramatic arguments classically arranged with a critical reflexivity.
When I say that such an ambition represents the “foothills” of art, I’m not necessarily ranking the infinitely various species of artistic effect. But I think that art of the foothills risks much less. It does not court disaster in the same way, for instance, as something lofty; there is no risk of a catastrophe as complete, let us say, as Die Winterreise, which aimed its leap for the heights of the Alps, and has ended up in the lake. Who believes that the MTC would risk disaster for the sake of art? Why bother with italics? What a commonplace! I might as well have said that our politicians never risk anything for the sake of revolution. Lamentable commonplaces!
Under Phillips, “lofty” has meant only the safety of rhetorical pomp, specially expressed in the rhetoric of stage mechanics and pasteboard monuments, such as last year’s Richard the Third, or Osage from 2009. I’ve heard that this new Shakespeare is a sparser affair. Well, we shall hear soon enough. (edit: Oh, lord, I’ve just read that they are aiming for that “Toorak-Vaucluse look”. Bloody cold hell, in thicket.)
The Joy of Text, on the other hand, is inspiring because it shows that despite the narrowness of ambition, the limitation of risk, if only they—but why not say “we”, as it is our company—that if only we had more faith, had not an awful addiction to compromise, the insatiable habit, that if only we could follow through on our one narrow artistic ambition, then we might have for ourselves a great little state theatre.
After all, there is nothing to be embarrassed at in these critically interesting well-made plays. The effect, when it comes off, is still, undoubtedly, artistic.
The effect I mean is that captivation, the trapping of a kind of “tragicomic truth” behind the classical surfaces of craft, as if said truth were an enchanted rose, or other desideratum of beauty, suspended in a crystal bell jar of flawless transparency: the sad, beautiful truth is revealed, but revealed as unattainable or impossible or unknowable, so in a sense, denied. I think of the playwriting tradition from Racine through Wilde to Pirandello, an art of ironies and deferrals, whether emotional or satirical.
We could establish a powerful and popular state theatre on this ground, because, as Robert Reid shows in this production, it is an artistic tradition sympathetic to our national traditions. We are really great at this kind of theatre when we lift our lazy gaze from the damned horizon and aim at something higher than a mere story, a mere attitude and a mere moral.
Reid does take good care, however, of these latter essentials. He describes the institutional and emotional chaos caused when Danny Cooper, a puckish high-school student, levels accusations of serious sexual misconduct against one of his teachers. Light observational humour poking fun at faculty politics and misbehaving students is joined seamlessly with a savage appraisal of Australian attitudes toward easy satire, which is then joined seamlessly with a dramatic examination of sticky contemporary issues such as the arbitrary nature of legal consent. It is a piece of consummate craftsmanship.
Everyone in this production is right there with Reid’s script, on the sharp edge of irony. The performers, under the brisk direction of Aidan Fennessy, ping smartly about the stage, expertly wielding the slick banter in close combat.
Behind this (mostly) flawless craftsmanship hangs truth and the medium in which it hangs is power. When Danny (James Bell), inspired by a book that evokes some of our most infamous literary controversies, explodes the customary relationship between teachers and students, he sets in play an engrossing contest over the question, “Who decides what is true?” What allures us is not so much the veracity of Danny Cooper’s allegations, but the substance behind his whole person, his psychology.
What Reid places before us is a convincing little portrait of the Australian literary culture. Famously, we are obsessed with hoaxes. More than that, we are obsessed with the mythology of hoaxing. In our passion to establish the motivations and circumstances of a hoax, which often leads us to see hoaxes where there are none, we attempt, collectively, to recover some truth from the hoax. By dissecting the life of Helen Darville, we expect to recover something true about Helen Demidenko.
We crave the enriching cultural effects of myth, but don’t want the “embarrassment” of engaging with the fiction directly, on its own imaginative grounds. Thus there is a hunger here in bourgeois society to ground all myths in tangible, reportable truths. We are, after all, a nation of voracious journalists.
This is one reason why boisterous naturalism is such a dominant tradition with us: it is the urge to report something real from the frontline of fancy; it is the urge to place the fantastical in a naturalising context, to ground it in something real. It does not worry us that such natural postures are still fake, that they do not themselves make the fancy any more real. That is the kind of problem that might nag at a culture more comfortable with abstractions, but not us. Neither are we especially concerned that our efforts at naturalising imaginative subjects are wasted efforts, that they would seem no more or less real within their own fictive worlds if arranged according to a non-naturalistic rule. This only gives us licence make our naturalistic prating even louder and more comical, or weepier and more sentimental, to employ caricature and all sorts of other business. This in turn shields us from a third trap of naturalism: it prevents us making our fictions too real. We are saved from the embarrassing sophistication of having our mirrors to well polished, of having our fictions dressed with too much that is real.
