Nightshift, by Phil Motherwell, directed by Phil Motherwell and Shiralee Hood. Lighting by Gabriel Townsend, projections by Ian De Grucy, photography by Rodney Manning, music by Joe Dolce. With Gary Carter, Jack Charles, Isaac Drandich, Shiralee Hood and Bill Tisdall. La Mama until March 23. Bookings: 9347 6142.
Watching the news on television last week, I caught a glimpse of a devastated and frail Lou Richards at the funeral of his wife Edna. And it prompted a sudden vivid memory of when I moved to Melbourne from Ballarat and began work as a copygirl on the afternoon daily newspaper, The Herald. Edna Richards ran the Phoenix, the pokey pub across the road from The Herald's Flinders Street offices where the journalists hung out after (and often during) work. Like all Herald journalists, I spent a bit of quality time at the Phoenix, though the details remain rather blurred. It had very steep steps, and it's a wonder that I never broke my neck.
That was in 1979. My memories have the glazed feel of sepia photographs: there is nothing so remote, as Barry Humphries once said, as the recent past. I was 18 when I came to Melbourne, and I didn't have a clue that everything was about to change. I was among the last intake of cadets to run copy on The Herald, taking the slim slips of coloured paper from the journalists as they banged out their stories on deadline on those huge green Remingtons, and running them to the subs. I was one of the last generation who worked with the hot metal presses, admiring the typesetters with their spatulate fingers and amazing ability to read text upside down and back to front, and who felt the whole building thunder and shake as the afternoon editions were printed downstairs.
I came in at the end of a lot of things. A couple of years later, I saw one of the last shows at the Pram Factory, before it was demolished to make way for a supermarket and car park: a play about Oscar Wilde's last days by the poet Evan Jones, called The Real Life of Sebastian Melmoth. That was the only time I ever went to the Pram. It was only later, when I began to review theatre in the late 1980s, that I wanted to know what had happened there. And believe me, it was hard to find out. Back then, very little was written down, and what was available to a tyro critic was worse than inadequate. The critical histories are only now beginning to be written. If you wanted to know what it was like, you had to talk to people.
One name that cropped up a lot was that of Lindzee Smith, who inspired a generation of theatre makers, and whose legacy is a living, if largely unremarked, subtext in Melbourne theatre. It's there, for instance, in the drama graduates that have emerged in the past decade from the VCA, under Richard Murphet (a member of Smith's group Nightshift) and Lindy Davies - the raw, intelligent energies of companies like Uncle Semolina & Friends or A Poor Theatre. It's there in the writing of Daniel Keene, whose early work Smith championed, and who says that Smith was the person who showed him how exciting theatre could be.
And if you get along to La Mama this week, you can see Nightshift, an evening of plays written and directed by Phil Motherwell, which are mounted as a tribute to Smith on the anniversary of his death last year. It's as rough as guts, a theatre that is unapologetically about the performer, the text and the audience, and it depends on a current of energy that isn't always present in the actors. But this is theatre that was never about perfection; and when it hits the sweet spot, it's the real thing.
As Motherwell's poetic narratives themselves do, it reminds you that much of Melbourne's history remains obscure. When you look at the work Smith directed in Melbourne in the '70s, it seems extraordinary that he is not a household name: it includes not only familiar local names like Jack Hibberd (White with Wire Wheels) or John Romeril (The Floating World), but Rainer Fassbinder, Franz Xavier Kroetz, Sam Shepard, James Purdy, Peter Handke, Heathcote Williams, Maria Irene Fornes and Arrabal.
These achievements, along with those of the other APG sub-groups, have been largely sidelined in favour of the Williamsonian mythos, in which the most conservative theatre of the '70s became the dominant theatrical force in '80s and '90s Melbourne. Nightshift was regarded as an outlaw offshoot of the Australian Performing Group, a bunch of junkies and outsiders. Which wasn't entirely inaccurate, and perhaps explains a little of the obscurity, but is certainly reductive.
Age critic Leonard Radic characterised this work (when he noticed it at all) as "Internationalist", which he opposed to the nationalistic narrative of "Australian stories" that triumphed over the cultural cringe of the 1950s. But the truth is, as Richard Murphet suggests in his memoir of the APG, that the seeds of a mature and confident Australian theatre were sewn here. The "Internationalists", as Motherwell's plays remind you, were as intensely parochial as Lou Richards. But they were parochial in the sense that, say, Rimbaud was parochial: absolutely and specifically of their time and place.
Motherwell, who collaborated closely with Smith, deserves to be much more than a footnote in Australian playwriting. I once described Stephen Sewell as "the leftist firebrand we had to have". Where Sewell is the acceptable face of radical playwriting, Motherwell is a much more uncomfortable and anarchic spirit. He is also a far superior writer, eschewing the political lecturing that bedevils Sewell's work and with a poetic discipline Sewell signally lacks. To my knowledge, Motherwell's plays have not been performed beyond a small band of companies, and yet these are texts of deep theatrical and literary intelligence, among the hidden gems of Australian theatre.
Nightshift consists of three plays, woven together into a single shifting performance, interspersed with songs: The Fitzroy Yank, The Native Rose and Steal Away Home. The plays are introduced by the recitation of a poem by Motherwell himself, that literally sets the scene: urban, inner-city, working class Melbourne. All of them are memory plays, excavating histories and people that mostly remain on the verges of our national consciousness.
The first two are monologues. Fitzroy Yank, performed with a raw, irresistible energy by Isaac Drandich, is a jagged, vivid text that describes the violent inner landscape of a young man. The Native Rose, performed by Shiralee Hood, is the story of a war-time prostitute and junkie. Steal Away Home, a full-length play, is about a young thief who is a member of the Stolen Generation. It was first performed at Playbox in 1988, a decade before the Bringing Them Home report brought the issue of stolen children into the spotlight of public discussion.
In none of these plays is the outsider portrayed as a victim; these are stories - romances, even - of bright rebellion in the face of obdurate, wounding reality. Jack, the thief in Steal Away Home, is unrepentant - "stealing was fun", he says - and simply doesn't care at all about those he robs. At no point does he move to an integration with the society that rejects him, and nor is there any likely redemption. Motherwell gives his characters a self-sufficiency that looks to itself for validation, and the audience can decide what it thinks for itself. The closest he gets to a moral is at the end of Steal Away Home, when Jack's Aunty Pat says: "We want something different for [our children]. We want them to share with each other, look out for each other. We sing charms to make them generous."
Motherwell writes in the tradition of outsider poets such as François Villon and Jean Genet, bringing to a diction and landscape that is purely Melburnian an authentic lyric radicalism. Anyone who has struggled through Sartre's huge and often deeply irritating volume Saint Genet will understand the perils of a bourgeois fascination with the trangressions of criminality, which in Sartre's case, for all his philosophical vocabulary, often seems like a teenager's awestruck hero worship of the bad boy in a leather jacket. Motherwell escapes that trap and a possible attendent sentimentality by, well, not being bourgeois, but this also means that his writings remain largely unknown and unpublished.
The shows are directed using Smith's spare production style, which Murphet describes as "a naked, raw mise en scene (eg a spotlight or slide projector light against a brick wall) that highlighted the individual on the edge, surviving through sheer force of presence". Images - trees, windows, Collingwood Town Hall, the Melways - are projected on the walls and floor of La Mama, and lighting is confined to simple spot lights on performers. The focus is directed entirely onto the performers and the text. This works well for the monologues, but considerably flattens out the theatricality of the longer play. There are longueurs, but equally there are moments - notably from Shiralee Hood, Isaac Drandich and Jack Charles - when Nightshift is simply brilliant theatre.
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