QUOTE “SICK” UNQUOTE

LENNY BRUCE: 13 DAZE UNDUG IN SYDNEY
presented by the Tamarama Rock Surfers, April 2013

Newcastle, 1999. We were partying just as the Prince song had instructed us to. Benito “The Fooz” Foozolini was out on the street corner sharing a rolly with some laser beaked debonair dressed as a Pterodactyl while I took Polaroids of passing trade and swapped the results for beer. It was the Young Writers’ Festival and about twelve hundred people had crammed into a dance studio to sneer at Margo Scotch Finger for being too mainstream. Margo wrote the first political blog on the Sydney Harbinger and as such she was appropriately crucified by super fucking hip fucking radicals for being a part of the establishment. Then she lit up a ciggie and we all looked like fools for being abashed. Nobody was allowed to smoke indoors those daze. Not even radicals. At one point a naked man ran through the crowd carrying a flat cardboard box that smelt like smoky barbeque shouting “all pizza is theft” but that was fine. We just kept at our self-assigned task of mocking squares. Fucking Squares, Man.

“Over the last eighty years the campaign against government censorship has been almost completely a success story… in the case of blasphemous literature they have had only trivial setbacks”
Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition – John Coleman, 1962

Some cat was passing ’round spliffs and space cake in the name of research and I said to Van Bingham – “hey- that’s John Brown, he wrote some childrens’ book I used to love. That guy basically taught me to read!” Van said no, that’s the Midnight Cat, his cousin. They look exactly the same. I’d already spent half the night sponging cash off him for ginger ale so it’s just as well. Man if he ever finds out I’ll have to pay him back that tenner. Booze was cheap in those days so you could live cold on the dole and still sleep in a park for five days, and still have some extra dough for a night at the Crowne Plaza, where you could swap post-midnight semillon for LSD and MDMA… I spent the following day in a kimono heckling sound artists and holding court outside the festival club. I think that’s where The Fooz first noticed my talent for spectacle but I can’t be sure

“in the 1930’s and 40’s writer’s organisations such as The Australian Fellowship of Writers and The Australian Journalists Association would one minute defend our right to read banned novels because they were expressions of the True and the Beautiful and the next would denounce American Comics as Jewish-Negroid-Southern-European inspirations unfit for White Australians”
Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition – John Coleman, 1962

Around that time I ran into the Ghost of Bob Ellis. He told me to change my name back to Sanchez. So I did. I asked him to come up for a reading of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties in an abandoned shop window on Hunter St but there was no-one to read Gwendolen or Cecily, not even for ready money. It was already 9am but we found Maryam Lion out and about and she stepped up to the crease like Allan Border in the mid-eighties. Sans moustache of course. Later she became the only Australian guest on lateline or Q and A to ever walk away with dignity. Dig? They never had her back. The reading went well. I played Tristan Tzara but the only thing I’d had for breakfast was the space cake I’d got from John Brown’s cousin’s friend the night before. In the play he’s hanging out with James Joyce and by the time he takes on Ulysses my vision was doubled and I had the appearance of the Rumanian Undead.They started calling me ‘Vlad The Inhaler’ but Any attempt at Eastern European accent was fine but for some reason all I could speak was fluent Oscar Wilde.

Meanwhile Van Bingham had red and blue ribbons in her hair and was quietly becoming a destroyer-of-worlds. Some ten years later I bribed her friend Lucy Grayskull ten thousand cubits to cast me as Sergei Petrov in a ten minute reconstruction of the life of “The Glimmerman” or Blind Boy Ziesel, as he preferred. The Fooz had wrote it on the back of a red-wine hangover coaster and it seemed to make sense. it was the begining of the end. Soon we would all become legitimate artists in our own right. Humiliating.

Having declared the battle against government censorship a varied success in 1962, John Coleman went on to briefly become Chief Censor in NSW. In twenty-thirteen, a movie depicting gay sex is banned. You still can’t say “cocksucker” on free-to air TV but you can replay video of the deaths of thousands of people again, and again, and again, all through the day and night. You can promote gambling and booze to children in prime-time because ‘free markets’ and these are acceptable forms of self-abuse. But a woman breastfeeding her child in public? There’s no political will to defend that. We’ve always been uptight about banning books in this country (famously including Nabakov, D H Lawrence and of course, Ulysses). But in the context of Mr Coleman’s comments, one cannot help but wonder – was it Mr Bruce’s obscenities which caused him to be banned? Or might the journalists of the time been more forgiving if he happened to be white?

This play is probably the most important new work I have seen all year (and I’ve seen a few). It’s a vital piece of Sydney history, painstakingly researched and developed for the stage, with tight, powerhouse performances, laughter and music to boot. We can’t add anything to it because there’s simply so much there to enjoy, and learn, and laugh with, and cry for. With one week left, you would be mad to miss out.

Lenny Bruce, 13 Daze Undug in Sydney, by Benito Di Fonzo, directed by Lucinda Gleeson. Featuring Sam Haft, Lenore Munro, Damien Strouthos & Dorje Swallow.
Playing at the Bondi Pavilion until May 4th, 2013.

REACH FOR THE SKY

LUCY BLACK
presented by subtlenuance, at the TAP Gallery, May 2012

This is a fine play, replete with passionate performances, restraint, wit and darkness. Playwright Paul Gilchrist has a reputation for a richness in wordplay that balances the bawdy with the beatific and the brutal – his newest work does not disappoint. From the first strings of dialogue we are caught between styles of speech that clash like water on jagged rocks; impossible idealistic poetry jarring against quick pragmatism. It’s these two vast thematic motifs that stretch throughout the narrative for a smart eighty-odd minutes of tension and intrigue. The only drawback we can name is that the language is so richly plotted one can easily get caught up in it and miss a beat – all things considered a good thing, adhering to the golden rule of showbiz – leaving this audience member wanting more.

The density of the language is matched by the characterisations, contrasting between exuberant passionate youth, calculating cynicism, larrikin menace, mortal idealism and the cool emotional distance and restraint of the title role. Gilchrist and his ensemble have managed to find a rewarding blend for the cast of characters showing us both what each character represents thematically in the work but also, crucially what they want within the context of the narrative, no mean feat given the breadth of the stakes at play. For these are not simply individual quests for power or survival or money or love (although all of these things are on the line) – but the broader, human story of the progress of civilisation, that it’s set in the dark period of history full of uncertainty and medieval superstition emphasises the significance that it could easily be a modern journey as well – for are not people being murdered or imprisoned in the name of social justice every day? Lest we forget that for a thin veneer of square meals and the security of running water we might also fall into a darker time, lest we forget that the giants on whose shoulder we might climb, whether they be Newton, Voltaire, Epicurus or Nietzsche, also once stood and wondered what might be, like everyone, an ordinary human blessed with the yoke of curiosity. Gripping, intelligent theatre.

LUCY BLACK, written and directed by Paul Gilchrist, presented by subtlenuance at the TAP Gallery; featuring Richard Hilliar, Sonya Kerr, Corinne Marie, Joshua Morton and Zara Zoe. Until June 3rd.

CRITIC WATCH: I’ll Be Watching You

EVERY BREATH

presented by Company B, April 2012.

… we don’t know what kind of a fool, having seen a plague of Benedict Andrews’ productions on Sydney stages in recent years; would go and see one that is actually written by him as well, and then read it as a conventional piece of narrative. Are you all mad or just obtuse?

MAINSTRRRM IN A TEACUP

…after the furore of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards had settled (has it?); it occurred to me that there was a writer’s festival on, and I really should get a wriggle onto being there. And maybe tell a few people what happened. But that’s a story for another day, as one conversation lead to the conclusion that We Need to Talk About Funding, Kevin – what’s thirty grand in the scheme of things when Ms Blanchett asked for thirty million back in February and scarcely got a mention in the Federal Arts budget? Apparently business as usual is good enough for those of us struggling to get a snifter of a wage in creating new Australian theatre.