Review: Madagascar

J.T. Rogers's play Madagascar made me think of American MFA programs. When I looked him up, it was no surprise to discover that he graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts. From a distance, the writing that emerges from these programs has a particular, but very identifiable, smell.

They've more or less done for contemporary American poetry. There are always exceptions that prove the rule, of course - Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg, who both taught poetry programs, spring lawlessly to mind - but the proliferation of polite, competently-written, dull poeticisms that presently clog the arteries of US lit are a direct result of the MFA creative writing programs, which raise well-meaning young poets to be well-meaning teachers who, in a kind of nightmare of eternal recurrence, then publish each other.


Madagascar is of this ilk. You can almost hear the sawing in the background as the metaphors and themes are workshopped. But most of all, what gives it away is the closed mental universe it inhabits. It's about the thoughts and sufferings of wealthy Americans, for whom the world is a giant mirror in which the poverty of their aching selves is revealed. It's a play that wants to be liked, that assumes - perhaps cleverly - that its audience is a middle class, liberal bunch with vague concerns about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket. The audience gets to hear a lot about themselves, and even more about the meaning of life.

It's an odd choice for the MTC, although you can see why Sam Strong might have chosen to direct it. Like Red Sky Morning, the Tom Holloway play he directed for Red Stitch to deserved acclaim, it's a play that consists of three interwoven monologues that explore the interior lives of three intimate but tragically estranged people. In Holloway's case, the conceit was brilliantly effective: sensitive to the patterns of colloquial speech, he created a poetic oratorio that wrenchingly revealed the inarticulate desires and loneliness of his characters. Rogers, on the other hand, failed to make me care at all about his characters.

The failure is all in the writing. The production was as good as is possible with this text: if the orchestration of the lighting became a bit soporific, or if the design seemed emptily pretty, it was hard to think what else the production team could have done. And the three actors - Noni Hazlehurst, Asher Keddie and Nicholas Bell - bring real and feeling presences that do much to mitigate the banality of the writing. Because of the excellence of the production, it makes it the kind of experience that is chiefly irritating in retrospect, when you think over what it is actually saying.

According to Rogers, he is unusual among US playwrights because he looks beyond America. "The truth is, we don’t have the luxury any more of making theatre that just reflects us," he said recently in New York. "Why should the world listen to us if we’re just talking about ourselves?" Indeed. If this is really an outward-looking play, then American theatre culture must indeed be a hall of mirrors. (Luckily, at this point one thinks of Tony Kushner.)

Rogers's idea of "dramatizing the stories of people from countries and cultures different from our own" is to change the wallpaper: viz, put an American family in Rome. In Madagascar, he treads in a fine tradition of works about Americans abroad: the film Three Coins in a Fountain, say, or Tennessee Williams's The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone, or James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, which was recently beautifully adapted for theatre in Gary Abrahams's Acts of Deceit. But here, the lost American is just a cliche.

June (Asher Keddie) is a young woman who has fled her wealthy family to live as a tourist guide in Rome after her brother Paul has gone missing in Africa. Five years before June’s residence, her mother Lilian (Noni Hazlehurst) is waiting in the same apartment to meet her son, and June's brother, after a six-month estrangement. Lilian is married to Arthur, a charismatic, world-famous economist who spends most of his time in Africa. Nathan (Nicholas Bell), who turns up a few days after June, is Arthur’s colleague: a mid-level, middle aged economist who is Lilian’s long-term adulterous lover.

Together they narrate in a mildly fragmented fashion the story of a privileged, self-destructive family hypnotised by self-delusion: perhaps chiefly by the notion, symbolised by the figures of the economists, that there is a legible pattern in even the most random coincidences. There were hopeful moments in the first twenty minutes or so when I thought I was in for an interesting night: some good one-liners, some promising arcing of narrative spark. But as the story devolved into clunky melodrama, and the characters became more and more inexplicable, and the message got heavier and heavier, I found myself just admiring the actors for making as much sense of it as they did.

The rest of the world doesn’t get a look in, except as furniture to decorate the characters' self-obsessions. Rome is a collection of ancient tourist attractions, rather than a living city full of Italians. The Third World – represented by Lilian’s fanciful imaginings of Madagascar – functions as a mirror in which their self-delusion explodes, or as a fantasy of escape, or a paradigm of distressing disorder and violence.

Most of all, the Third World represents American GUILT, for which they must all be PUNISHED. Every character went on and on about punishment. What a relief, really, to find that it was the fault of the over-possessive, selfish mother. (As an aside, the playwright's idea of female sexuality seems drawn from bodice-rippers - the women both want to penetrated and ravished and dragged off by Dark Gods to the Underworld - and comes across as borderline misogyny).

If there were an iota of irony in Rogers’s perspective, this might have made an interesting play. But it never expands its vision past its unconvincing characters, with whom we are meant to identify and sympathise. The writing is surprisingly coarse and undramatic: metaphors and repetitions are laboured to within an inch of their lives. Its banality is excused by gestures towards mystery. But when you examine the mystery you feel, as Gertrude Stein once said, that “there is no there there”.

Picture: Noni Hazlehurst (top) and Asher Keddie in Madagascar.

Madagascar, by JT Rogers, directed by Sam Strong. Sets and costumes by Jo Briscoe, lighting design by Paul Jackson, sound design by Darrin Verhagen. With Asher Keddie, Noni Hazlehurst and Nicholas Bell. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until April 3.