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‘Like this little spirit that wafts’: Contemporary Theatre in Australia

CAL/Meanjin essay by Lorin Clarke April 20

Earlier this month, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards announced that it would not include a shortlist for the Play Award category, as was the judges’ discretion. Yet as Lorin Clarke discovered in the March issue of Meanjin, there is much about contemporary Australian theatre that continues to thrill, disturb and delight. From Geoffrey Rush’s Tony award-winning role in Exit the King to the experimental work of Small Metal Objects, or the media-saturated, avant-garde production of 3xSisters, Clarke reveals a diversity which in itself is worthy of celebration. The full essay is now available on our editions page and you can read a short extract below.



It’s a warm summer evening, Sydney Arts Festival 2007. Peak hour at Circular Quay. We’ve been standing here for forty minutes, like a row of prisoners in the sun, fidgety and self-conscious. Commuters glance suspiciously at us as they hurry past. ‘What are they here for?’ someone asks. Once we’ve finally clambered up the wooden rostra and taken a seat on the raised platforms, our purpose becomes obvious to everybody, and we relax. We’re the audience.

It’s fun to be up here together, looking down at the commuters looking up at us. There are headphones on our chairs—big, clumpy, earmuff-type ones. We put them on, smiling at each other. We’re like a team now. The headphones are playing a soundscape: atmospheric sounds and music. We settle in. The people in Circular Quay are stopping, discussing us. Swivelling their necks around to find whatever screen we must be watching. Some of them act out, waving or poking out their tongues. One guy—after a brief conference with his mates—does a cartwheel and, after a smattering of applause, politely bows. It’s been a while now. The guy behind me says, ‘I get it. This is the show.’

The show was Back to Back Theatre’s Small Metal Objects. Ostensibly a scripted show about four characters attempting to do a drug deal in a public place, the story was by no means the most significant element of the production. Despite the fact that nobody had yet spoken a word of the script, the guy behind me was right. He would have been right if he’d declared that the show had started when we were standing in the queue, or when each of us arrived. Small Metal Objects conflated the everyday and the theatrical, depending on its audience’s casual presumptions; shifting our personal perspectives in a very public place. We heard the actors speaking through our headphones before we saw them. It was a desperate feeling, not being able to patch together a definitive profile of the speaker by using our sight and hearing, both senses now totally alert. Also, there was something about the dialogue we were listening to that was difficult to comprehend without a visual. I thought maybe one of the actors had an accent. I checked the volume on my headphones. Was it that not being able to see the speaker rendered me slightly deaf?

I did finally see the actors in the crowd, and then realised that some of the performers in the company had intellectual disabilities. Those opening moments of aural/visual dissonance were intended as a reminder of how dependent we are on sight and hearing to formulate perceptions and make judgements. We watched four actors playing their parts—two friends, each with a disability, bullied and cajoled by a couple of brash businesspeople trying to close a commercial deal whose terms the friends didn’t accept—and we didn’t accept the terms either. Nor did we accept the terms of several other social contracts we witnessed during the play. We were furious, for instance, when an annoyed-looking woman (a passer-by), detecting something unusual in actor Simon Laherty’s behaviour (he was talking, she thought, to himself), pressed her face up next to him, interrupted his performance, and demanded to know what he was doing. When Simon turned back to face the audience, the woman followed his gaze, noticed us watching her, and fled.


 

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