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the self-centred society

keith gallasch: post, who’s the best?; belvoir, the business

Eden Falk, Zoe Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor, Who's the Best?

Eden Falk, Zoe Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor, Who’s the Best?

TWO PRODUCTIONS WITH COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERFORMATIVE IDIOMS FOCUS ON THE PREVALENT ETHOS OF SELF-CENTREDNESS IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY WITH SATIRICAL VIGOUR AND RAW HUMOUR. NEOLIBERALISM’S NEO-DARWINIST RALLYING CALL, GORDON GECKO’S “GREED IS GOOD” (WALL STREET, 1987), REMAINS LARGELY UNDISCREDITED DESPITE THE LESSONS OF THE GFC, SO EMBEDDED IS THE ETHOS OF SELFISHNESS IN EVERYTHING FROM TV ADVERTISEMENTS WHERE PEOPLE PINCH FOOD, BOYFRIENDS AND CARS FROM FAMILY OR FRIENDS, TO REALITY TV’S CRUDE AND CRUEL ELEVATION OF SOLE SURVIVAL OVER COOPERATION, TO THE PERSONAL PRONOUN-ISM OF SELFHOOD INITIATED BY MYSPACE AND CONFIRMED BY MYBUS, MYSCHOOL, IPHONE AND THEIR SUNDRY IMITATORS.

stc next stage: post, who’s the best?

I was seduced and wowed by Post’s infectiously delirious Who’s the Best?, commissioned by Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 2 Next Stages program. Once again Post raise daggy amateurism to sublime artform—and with more professional verve than ever (see RT101). This experiment to determine which of the three collaborators and friends is the best performer employs a range of tests from Dolly quizzes and Enneagram tests to talent assessments and rating who’s the ‘hottest.’ These are constantly complicated or sidetracked by hilariously mind bending battles of the Abbot and Costello “Who’s on first” variety over the semantics of labelling that frame the tests or even incidental everyday expressions. These are adroitly woven through the script, recurring as running gags and providing an immersive, accelerating pulse to the work.

The performers’ casual delivery (always played directly to the audience while they freely insult each other) yields intimacy and immediacy on a stage which wickedly threatens to subvert the show as curtains and lighting go about their own business regardless—inevitably thwarting attempts to be the ‘best.’ Trio member and co-devisor Natalie Rose, who has recently had a child, is replaced for the premiere season by a wigged Eden Falk who slips easily into the Post mode while bringing his own wide-eyed innocence to Who’s the Best? alongside the well-honed comic personae of Mish Grigor and Zoe Coombs Marr. What adds bite and fun to the show is the sense that the performers are playing themselves with quite a few home truths aimed at demolishing self-centredness despite the final, chanted declaration “we are the best!”

John Leary, Samantha Young, Jody Kennedy, Thomas Henning, The Business

John Leary, Samantha Young, Jody Kennedy, Thomas Henning, The Business

John Leary, Samantha Young, Jody Kennedy, Thomas Henning, The Business

belvoir: the business

Belvoir’s production of Jonathan Gavin’s bitterly funny The Business is set in the 1980s, the very period in which the ‘greed is good’ ethos was getting into its public stride—and we still march to its insistent step in 2011. The world of The Business feels quite like home.

Grossly self-obsessed behaviour is central to Gavin’s bitter-black comedy of bad manners and inheritance snatching, with director Cristabel Sved and costume designer Stephen Curtis wickedly ramping up the rude behaviour and appalling dress sense of the characters to the edge of grotesquerie, but somehow without losing the sense of these people as real, thwarted and, at times, oddly innocent and certainly pathetic—such is their tunnel-vision of the world.

Gavin and Sved took their cue for The Business from Russian writer Maxim Gorky’s grim, sometimes comic play Vassa Zheleznova, which premiered in 1911 and was later a favourite of Stalin who saw it many times, presumably enjoying the agonies of a bourgeois family in their act of self-destruction (and enforced changes to the play in 1935 to suit his tastes). Gavin’s play is based on Gorky’s; it is not an adaptation. But in both there is a shared, strong focus on the female characters.

In Gorky’s original, Vassa, wife to a shipping agent, Zheleznova, is relieved when her husband dies at the end of Act 1 as opposed to the wrenching, protracted and off-stage decline in Gavin’s play which ups the suspense and complications of the mother and her disaffected daughter’s machinations to secure the inheritance the household patriarch would have denied them. Zheleznova’s death is also a relief because the charge of raping a 12-year-old servant girl will now not go to court. Vassa battles on alone, corralling daughters and servants, bribing dockworkers and police and bickering with her estranged socialist daughter (torn between motherhood and the life of a revolutionary) over possession of the latter’s child. The pressure is such that Vassa dies at the play’s end, an exhausted manipulator. Gorky’s empathy for her is limited, but he makes it clear that as well as being a nasty bourgeois she is to varying degrees a victim, though always a fighter.

The Business’ 1980s family is immigrant in origin (no coffee, just a steady flow of tea), wealthy, the adult Australian-raised offspring and their spouses child-like and spoilt. The runaway daughter Anna (Kate Box) returns home, apparently more principled than the rest but, like her mother, Van (Sarah Peirse) embittered by her father’s mistreatment and ready to conspire with Van to seize the inheritance from the ne’er-do-well siblings who would promptly sell-off the family business.

The plays by Gorky and Gavin share the same spirited assault on the bourgeoisie—but what at first seems grimly frantic and comic slips into dispirited horror. Gorky’s Vassa demands that her husband suicide (he dies without resort to that but there is no grieving); Gavin’s Ronald (Van’s crippled second son; Thomas Henning) kills his wife’s lover Gary (Russell Kiefel) and the family dutifully manages the cover-up. Not least because the principal mother-daughter relationship is more nuanced and the two women win out, The Business comes off as more complex than Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova. The Business might represent a victory for women but not necessarily for integrity or compassion, as if to say the legacy of the 80s is a greedy, self-serving culture, whose children live in luxury and surly disaffection, emasculated by their parents who completely control the business. In this world Van, unlike Vassa, must live on, the legacy doubtless intended for a daughter who will become like her mother, or already has.

If The Business is not strong on 80s Australian politics and culture (Belvoir’s Wild Duck, RT102, similarly kept its distance from contemporary social realities) the specificities of time and place are largely left to design (Victoria Lamb)—an aptly tackily furnished, expensive modernist home with Californian bungalow exposed stone walls, a lounge room replete with board games for children who will never grow up, and a sunny porch that becomes a site for unexpected violence. Costumes (Stephen Curtis) and hairstyling are comically acute, viciously accentuating character traits and some of the fashion follies of the period. Van’s power-dressed shoulders and daughter Anna’s great height pushed up by heels and hairstyle immediately suggest competing forces. The casual wear and pronounced body shapes of the other brattish siblings, Simon (John Leary) and Natalie (Samantha Young), amplify their laziness while the hunching, lank-haired, bare-chested wild-child Ronald (Henning) lurches about like a purposeless Iggy Popp. A persistent soundtrack of 80s pop ranging from the execrable to the arty further compounds the period sense. The family lives inside this bubble. The business is not loved—it’s simply what it means in terms of survival or sustained leisure.

Kate Box in reflection and Thomas Henning, The Business

Kate Box in reflection and Thomas Henning, The Business

Kate Box in reflection and Thomas Henning, The Business

The one aspect of the family business that is focused on is a legal suit against it for the death of a worker who refused to wear a protective mask (“What is OH&S anyway?”). Van simply doesn’t want the company to accept responsibility—the victim was, after all, a chronic smoker. This is the world of The Business—a selfish society that doesn’t care enough for itself let alone others.

Inevitably, a limited range of concerns and character traits generates grotesques, utterly without empathy for the dying father (who clearly showed none to them) and locked in a bitter fight for an inheritance that Van has worked so hard for but that others simply feel they deserve. Emotions run to extremes but in Van we can see the fluctuating degrees of frustration, anger, near defeat and the need for reconciliation with Anna, even if it entails compromise. Van shows some compassion for the adulterous daughter-in-law Jennifer (Jody Kennedy)—even, as in Gorky’s original, working with her in the garden. The rest is misunderstanding, confusion, blindness and occasional insights that can’t be explored—Jennifer: “We’re all unhappy; none of us know how to love anything.” The best she can sadly come up with is: “I’m a human mix tape.” Van herself can barely live up to what she expects of her children: “These young people. ‘Duty,’ ‘consideration’—foreign concepts. I keep hoping one day they’ll grow up.” Her relationship with her husband is just as muddy: “So what? Maybe he was violent and drunk and yes he cheated on me, but it’s men like this who made this country what it is.”

What makes The Business potent is its emotional cruelty presented in the guise of comedy, sometimes bordering on farce, rich in gags (the business over a dead parrot, the nouveau riche ‘luxury’ of croissants stuffed with Fruit Loops), in explosive tensions and, not least, suspense (who will get the inheritance?)—and then shock. Director Cristabel Sved and her cast are endlessly inventive, keeping these monsters believable. If you were hoping for empathy and compassion and felt short changed then The Business was not for you—like Gorky’s original, this is tough social satire, even if Gavin is a tad more forgiving. And sometimes tougher: a communal sing-along in the Gorky is replaced with the dissolute Simon and Natalie’s faithful rendering of a ‘Tab Cola’ jingle, followed by Simon’s “Want a root?” It’s that kind of play, that kind of world. In the current political climate we’re hardly in a position to deny it.

Performances in The Business were uniformly excellent, underpinned by a strong sense of ensemble. Sarah Peirse’s Van rarely allows her bitterness to defeat her purpose or her anger to overrule the requisite moments of compassion or opportunism. Peirse plays out Van’s considerable contradictions without doubt or hesitancy. [Appraisal of the other performances can be found in the full review.] In working from Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova, Jonathan Gavin has created a play that is his own, one finely realised by his collaborators and, sadly (if wickedly funny), a play for and of our times.

Post, Who’s the Best?, creator-performers Zoe Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor, Eden Falk, devisor Natalie Rose, lighting Matthew Marshall, consultants Emma Saunders, Hallie Shellam, Clare Grant; Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company, Next stage 2011, June 17-July 2; Belvoir: The Business, writer Jonathan Gavin, based on Maxim Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova, director Cristabel Sved, performers Kate Box, Grant Dodwell, Thomas Henning, Jody Kennedy, Russell Kiefel, John Leary, Sarah Pierse, Samantha Young, set design Victoria Lamb, costumes Stephen Curtis, lighting Verity Hampson, composer/sound Max Lyandvert; Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, April 27-May 29

Because of illness, the writer’s reviews of Belvoir’s The Seagull and PACT’s Bully Beef Stew will appear in RealTime 105, October-November.

RealTime issue #104 Aug-Sept 2011 pg. 18

© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net

9 August 2011