Apropos of a discussion of Adam Broinwoski's Know No Cure in the review and comments of Hotel Obsino, Age writer Maher Mughrabi sent me a response to the Theatreworks production that he wrote at the time, and which remains unpublished. As it gives a very interesting slant on a controversial production that I didn't see, and picks up on some of the aspects of the play's language that most interested me, I think it's worth a splash here. Read on for Maher's take:

An appeal to me in this fiendish row – is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. 1

IN THE car on our way to St Kilda to see this play, my wife and I listened to a news item about a corporation called Dia-B Tech which had “discovered” a treatment for diabetes and obesity. The source was a plant that grows in Tonga and “traditional knowledge”. The use of this plant for medicinal purposes by generations of islanders was acknowledged in Dia-B Tech’s press releases, but they weren’t willing to name it until they could complete the patent process.

An academic suggested that the company owed it to Tonga and its people to share some of the financial benefits from this “discovery”, that there should be a “re-negotiation” with the communities that had provided the knowledge.

Since we’re unlikely to be granted a seat at that meeting, if indeed it ever occurs, Adam Broinowski’s Know No Cure offers a compelling alternative view of such talks. Like most meetings, it is slow to get going, but by the end it has a rhythm, an inner life – and death – all of its own.

The play is a negotiation between two actors, each charged with a multitude of roles. Matt Crosby is by turns the Lonely Planet tourist in search of his own personal Shangri-La, the multinational boss on the make and the colonist mapping out an undiscovered world which he hopes might give his own wanderings meaning. At the same time he is drugged up, liquored up and ruptured, a wide-eyed doomsday merchant but still unable to take that last step into the unknown.

His counterpart, played by Majid Shokor, is the native agent, the local guide, passport control and the exotic temptress (veil or no veil, your choice). He is the one-time inhabitant of a jungle, a swamp or a desert in the land where Crosby’s jet-engined magic carpet touches down. He dreams of being a “lazy, lazy fisherman” and sitting in the river again, until he is rudely reminded by his new employer/customer/governor that he doesn’t even remember how his forefathers fished and anyway, that river has long since become a waste valve for some “vigorous, dynamic” enterprise.

How much of this and other exchanges you actually pick up over the course of an hour and a half will depend largely on your ability to absorb jargon of all kinds – medical and military, economic and advertising. This language is all around us, but Broinowski must be listening to and reading it very carefully, since he writes largely in its cadences and phrases. It is a language that, despite its blandishments and all the unpleasant things it tidies up for our viewing, most people find either offputting or bewildering in such concentrated doses, which is a shame because apart from the odd bum note here and there, which may be as much the pressure of delivery on the actors as the writing, there’s a hell of a lot of meaning squeezed into these lines.

“Where are you from?” the passport officer asks. “Remote,” replies our intrepid adventurer, suggesting at once distance and control. “I am a civil engineer,” he says later, defending himself against the charge of plundering resources. “Your civil is member-exclusive,” the native accuses. “My civil is legitimate,” the engineer parries, before snapping under the close questioning: “I COME WITH NO MALICE!”

To come without malice, however, is not the same as coming in peace, or with love. At various points in the play, Crosby and Shokor’s relationship – their episodes of contact – are those not of explorer and indigene but of lovers, or even husband and wife. Arguments, silences, billing and cooing in German and Arabic, the public and private faces of coupledom, all lead us back to the same point on the map: the terra incognita at the heart of our dealings with every other human being. “You’re holding out on me,” Crosby rails. “You’re holding on to me,” Shokor replies, shaking free.

It is this fabled hold-out that Crosby’s explorer, his businessman, his secret agent needs to penetrate. “Can you take me to the interior?” he asks again and again. “No visa,” Shokor’s insider, all sunglasses and slicked-back hair, assures him at first. “The jungle is air-conditioned, mosquito-free.”

But what will the explorer bring to that place? And what will that mean for his faithful Man Friday? Both men begin to wonder, and to doubt. In the first sequence of the play, we are asked the question from a surgical perspective: how can we be sure that the foreign body will accept or reject a transplant? For me, this segment, with Crosby and Shokor in white coats and hairnets, hung at a rather awkward angle to the rest of the play, though its meaning eventually became clearer.

Transplant procedures are governed by the codes and practicalities of medicine, but the codes that govern sojourns in foreign lands are altogether less predictable, as the Bali Nine or the three Australians held in the United Arab Emirates for their alleged drunken misbehaviour on board an international flight attest. “I pride myself on being universal,” Crosby proclaims. But we do not yet live in a “borderless Babylon”, and there are still boundaries one can cross – and transgress.

For Shokor’s tourist guide, it turns out that the opposite of malice is not love but . . . golf, a sport of the universal jet set, in which the grass is as green in the desert of Dubai as it is in St Andrews or Augusta, Georgia. “Hate is a four-letter word,” the guide insists. “So is golf,” the tourist reminds him.

It takes a lot of water to maintain a golf course in a desert, a lot of air conditioning to keep the superstars of the PGA tour in the comfort to which they’ve become accustomed. It is this cost that begins to erode the native’s certainty, to make him wonder if he can even find the interior anymore, and what will be left of it if he does. He has become a stranger in his own land, a half-man who reminds us of the African fireman on Marlow’s boat in Heart of Darkness as it steams down the Congo:

. . . upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat . . . A few months of training had done for that really fine chap . . . he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge . . . neither that fireman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts.2

Broinowski and his actors do plenty of peering, at footage of windswept refugees, rivers of rush-hour traffic, burned and blighted forests and endangered species. Shokor’s native, like Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, begins to wonder if he is not already a “living fossil”, as Crosby dubs him, someone who can never connect with the prayers and daily life of his own father. Broinowski coins the word “endohistory”, which means internal history but also reminds us of the “end of history”, the universal triumph of free-market liberalism predicted by Francis Fukuyama in the 1990s. Has the latter been substituted for the former, or must the former “betray” the latter to survive?

These are questions which today have their pivot not in the scramble for Africa but the war for the Middle East. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, recently returned to office as the country’s defence minister, once warned his countrymen that they live in “a villa surrounded by a jungle”. But what does it mean to talk about a jungle here? And whose jungle is it, anyway?

Sitting in the theatre, my mind spun back to the time of the millennium, when I was in London to meet a fellow Palestinian. At one Tube station I caught sight of Jerusalem’s golden Dome of the Rock. It was a poster of the Israeli Tourism Ministry. “In the land where the first millennium began . . .” it read, with a silhouette picture of fishermen on the Sea of Galilee, “. . . The dome has already been built.”

For a moment, the cheeky reference to London’s troubled Millennium Dome distracted me from the use of a sacred Muslim site in occupied territory to entice holidaymakers to the Jewish state. Then I felt it, all at once: anger, humiliation, the irretrievable loss of my own past, powerlessness to remove the advert and what it stood for in the present.

The publicity for Broinowski’s play mentions that it was written in “the countdown to September 11”, a countdown few indeed can claim to have heard. Yet I wondered if Broinowski, or anyone in his audience, knew the story of September 11 terrorist Mohammed Atta’s return to Cairo in 1995. Atta had won a German grant to study plans to convert the capital’s old “Islamic city” into a tourist complex:

The government planned to “restore” the area by removing many of the people who lived there . . . repairing the old buildings and bringing in troupes of actors to play the real people they would displace. Bodenstein (a fellow student) described what happened: “We had a very critical discussion with the municipality. They didn’t understand our concerns. They wanted to do their work, dress people in costumes. They thought it was a good idea and couldn’t imagine why we would object.”

It was Atta’s first professional contact with the Egyptian bureaucracy and it distressed him, Bodenstein said. 3

To say that this episode alone might explain what followed is absurd. Yet there is a series of encounters and power relations at work in this story, and that of Dia-B Tech and the Tongan healers, or those tourists taken to specially enclosed African reserves to hunt big game provided for the purpose, that Broinowski clearly has an ear for. Safari itself is a Swahili word that comes from the Arabic word for travel. The two players bring such journeys to life in startling, moving and amusing fashion, giving us a sense of what is at stake and the dangers into which we venture. As Shokor tells Crosby, with a smile fresh from a brochure: “Choose your clubs carefully.”

Maher Mughrabi
July 2007

Notes
1 Marlow floating down the Thames narrates his memories of floating down the Congo in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Penguin, 1995), p. 63.
2 Heart of Darkness, p. 64.
3 Terry McDermott, “A Perfect Soldier”, Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2002, cited in Gilbert Achcar’s The Clash of Barbarisms: Sept 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder (Monthly Review Press, 2002), p. 55.

Fringe Festival: Hotel Obsino, written and directed by Adam Broinowski. Sound by Andrew Williamson, lighting by Gwendolyna Holmberg-Gilchrist. With Tom Davies, Eric Mitzak, Tahir Cambis, Le Roy Parsons, Melanie Douglas, Brendan Bacon and Dylan Lloyd, Erick Mitsak, Craig Hedger and Polash Larsen. La Mama until September 30. The Jerilderie Letter by Ned Kelly, directed by Lloyd Jones. With Peter Finlay and Malcom Hill (guitar). La Mama until September 30. Bookings: 9347 6142

"Complaining!" said Rainer Maria Rilke. "The ancient vice of poets!" Had there been blogs around in Rilke's day, he might have observed that bloggers give poets a run for their money on the whingeing front. One has to admit that there's a certain pleasure in it but, as those scabby old men who lived on top of poles in the desert were fond of saying, all earthly pleasures turn to dust. And the truth is, I've become a little tired of the sound of my complaining.

But since - I know - my state of being is of electric interest, and you are all on tenterhooks for the latest instalment, I'll reveal that Ms A is still banned from race courses as a likely carrier of Equine Influenza. If you happen to be in a theatre foyer and you see a shortish woman wearing a surgical mask and spraying nearby patrons with disinfectant, that's me.

Has my affliction stopped me from venturing heroically forth to breathe on other people? Hell no! I've been to four shows! But for the past few days, I have had certain problems actually thinking anything. And now I find that the two shows I saw at La Mama last weekend are about to close, and I am afflicted by guilt as well. Is there no end to my suffering?

The short story is that, unlike the microbes that have gatecrashed my body, Hotel Obsino and The Jerilderie Letter are both, for different reasons, worth catching. For the longer version, click on...

Adam Broinowski caused a minor stir in June when he objected to the rough treatment meted out to his play Know No Cure, which he directed at Theatreworks. That production was one of the many that I didn't get to, but the almost unanimous critical demolition made me curious, and I hunted down and read a copy of the text. As so often, I found myself disagreeing with the stern verdicts of my esteemed colleagues, at least as far as the text is concerned; but then, I've always found the flash and dazzle of ambition more exciting than the safe, steady glow of the expected, even if the dazzle ends up fizzling in the mud.

In any case, Know No Cure alerted me to an interesting theatrical voice, so I made sure I trotted along to Hotel Obsino, which is also directed and written by Broinowski. This is a very different kind of play; here Broinowski strings a series of loosely connected scenes along a simple narrative to explore the now-vanished netherworld of the residential hotel. These hotels, now mostly converted to town-house apartments or backpacker hostels, used to be common in Melbourne. They acted like a kind of social filter, catching all the detritus that couldn't find a place elsewhere: the homeless, the mentally ill, the criminal, the dispossessed.

Hotel Obsino demonstrates that Broinowski is a various writer: where Know No Cure exploits linguistic slippage in a science fiction scenario, here he shows a flair for realism and hard-edged comedy. Broinowski can write with a superb dramatic muscularity, edged with a kind of pitiless compassion that makes this more than an exercise in social observation. He sketches his cast of oddballs and misfits with a Dostoevskian eye for the absurdly tragic: these characters might be grotesque, but they retain their dignity. Their grotesqueries are not beneath humanity, but part of it, and thus implicit in us all.

It's this quality that makes the difference between work that, as it were, pokes sticks through the bars of the cage (the contemporary equivalent of visiting Bedlam) and work that moves towards a metaphorical contemplation of what, for want of invention, I am forced to call the "human condition". But for all the unexpected empathy his characters provoke - helped by some wonderful performances from a remarkably fearless cast - Broinowski doesn't wholly escape the ethical dilemmas of such work.

The catalyst for the action is the appearance of a writer figure, Noah (Tom Davies), who checks into the hotel. Noah provides an observational core around which constellate the various paranoid delusions and sad realities of his characters. He enters as a naif and leaves frightened and disturbed by what he has encountered.

The problem is that Noah seldom seems more than a dramatic device; he is an odd blank in the middle of the play who acts as a kind of mediation, a safety valve of "normality" that effectively protects the audience from a direct confrontation with the reality he is encountering. I found myself wishing that Noah would either disappear altogether or materialise in his full fleshly frailty, as grotesque, absurd, tender and desiring as the others; but he did neither. And since Noah acts as a kind of hinge between the audience and the play, the other characters are in danger of becoming "them" instead of "us", symptoms of a social disease we observe from the outside, rather than reflections of a dis-ease within ourselves.

Broinowski gives his text a fast-paced, high energy production which exploits the shabby intimacy of La Mama to evoke the dingy environs of this house of transients. It features some hugely enjoyable performances: Dylan Lloyd, Brendan Bacon and Le Roy Parsons are stand outs in a very strong cast that enacts the peculiarities or straight-out madness of its characters without descending into caricature or parody.

The Jerilderie Letter, Ned Kelly's defiant blast against the Imperial authorities before he went down with guns blazing, is an exercise in contrast. Here performance is about as minimal as it gets: director Lloyd Jones has enclosed a clean-shaven Peter Finlay in a box up to his neck. And for most of the show, his eyes are closed. He is a death's head on a plinth.

This Beckettian conceit illustrates the fact that Kelly's head was removed from his body after his execution so it could be examined for signs of genetic criminality and displayed to a duly horrified public. It's a tribute to Finlay's powers that such rigid constrictions make for a mesmerising performance.

He begins with a low, rhythmic murmer that caresses the rhythms of speech preserved in Kelly's extraordinary document, playing the music of the words over their meaning, as if he were saying a poem. As Finlay's performance evolves, so does his range of expression, until he summons all Kelly's anger, outrage, violence and grief. On the few occasions he opens his eyes, glaring at the audience with a high wattage of rage, it is as if a spotlight has been turned on. Finlay is always worth watching, and this is a remarkable performance.

Kelly's letter is a vivid mixture of gossip, braggadocio, violence, self-justification and the sly wit that has always been a defence of the powerless against the powerful. Behind it is the passionate desire to bear witness against injustice that seems to be an innate quality of being human. When Kelly speaks of the police raids on his home, it reminds you that the standard abuses of thuggish power are just as universal:

how they used to rush into the house upset all the milk dishes break tins of eggs empty the flour out of the bags on to the ground and even the meat out of the cask and destroy all the provisions and shove the girls in front of them into the rooms like dogs so as if any one was there they would shoot the girls first but they knew well I was not there or I would have scattered their blood and brains like rain I would manure the Eleven mile with their bloated carcases and yet remember there is not one drop of murderous blood in my veins

These techniques of domestic terror have been honoured in Chechnya and Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, Ireland and Kurdistan; wherever a population is considered criminal and inferior by colonising forces. But the document also makes clear that Kelly had learned from the violence of his superiors. Had he nourished the revolution he dreamed of, he would likely have become a tyrant in his turn.

by the light that shines pegged on an ant-bed with their bellies opened their fat taken out rendered and poured down their throat boiling hot will be fool to what pleasure I will give some of them and any person aiding or harbouring or assisting the Police in any way whatever or employing any person whom they know to be a detective or cad or those who would be so deprived as to take blood money will be outlawed and declared unfit to be allowed human buriel (sic) their property either consumed or confiscated and them theirs and all belonging to them exterminated off the face of the earth, the enemy I cannot catch myself I shall give a payable reward for

Which is, as Camus pointed out, why revolution is a synonym for going around in circles.

This otherwise remarkable show is marred by its accompaniment by poet/singer Malcolm Hill. He punctuates Finlay's performance with chords from his guitar, which works well; unfortunately, he also regales us with a couple of his compositions. He sings somewhat flat, but even that might be forgiven if the lyrics weren't so unashamedly awful. They focus on green sashes and shamrocks and the great Irish hero Ned Kelly (and so on and so forth).

This is the kind of stuff that gives my Irish friends a bad pain in their midriff, and no wonder. By framing Kelly's statement in such sentimental tosh, it also threatens to obscure the raw power of the document. But luckily, most of the time you are watching Finlay.