"The train moves forward and he is still, he allows the machine and its engines to carry him. He is listening without hearing, watching the world without seeing it." - Barracuda, Christos Tsiolkas
The train network in Melbourne is a web. It circles the
inner city and spreads out like tendrils into the suburbs, creeping further and
further away from the affluent centre. But as a public transport system, it is
a great equalizer, bringing people from all points of the sprawling metropolis
together. Sometimes too close for comfort. Interaction leads to reaction. A
catalyst for drama. A spark for the fire next time.
Twenty-one years ago, four playwrights and a composer
collaborated on a seminal piece of Australian theatre, Who’s Afraid of the
Working Class? It was written for the tenth anniversary of the Melbourne
Workers Theatre, a company now defunct but never expected to last much past its
origin point, putting on plays in the Jolimont railyards.
Christos Tsiolkas, Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius,
Melissa Reeves and Irene Vela have been reunited to create Anthem for
the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Class is central to their new work,
but race is also tackled head-on, in five interwoven pieces that take place mostly
on Melbourne’s train network.
Reeves’ Bonnie & Clyde-style comedy about an exploited
7/11 worker trying to get the money he’s owed is farcical but grounded in the
reality of casual and part-time workers being exploited with unpaid overtime or
compromised working conditions.
Cornelius pens a story titled Terror about a woman suddenly
facing economic anxiety coming face-to-face with the housekeeper she employed
by never really knew. It’s frank and poetic and uncomfortable and full of empathy
for the women and their situations, while acknowledging the privilege the once-wealthy
white woman still has.
Throughout Tsiolkas’ career, he has tackled class and race,
and here he writes of a colourful group of Brothers & Sisters coming
back together after many years; children of one mother and four different
fathers. The conceit of each father being from a different ethnic background –
white, Indigenous, African and Arabic – feels a little bit neat, but he writes
such clear characters and such compelling dramatic action that you can forgive
the convenient set-up.
Bovell’s chorus of commuters slowly pulls the threads of the
other stories together, ever-tightening across the network, where there’s one
thing that draws a disparate group of people together – the frustration of a
delay. But what is out there on the Alamein line? The Frankston line? The
Mernda line between North-cunt and De-Preston?
Irene Vela’s piece, Resistence, is an evocative score
that alludes to buskers but heightens some of the inner-carriage, inner-city
tensions throughout the play.
Fourteen actors on stage bring a wild array of characters to
life across all these stories. They are mostly playing “types” – the kind of
people you see in public and perhaps make assumptions about, but there are a
few times the performers get to dig a little deeper.
Maria Mercedes’ character in Tsiolkas’ piece has a memorable
moment with her husband in Greek, later replayed in English for the full effect,
even though you might have been able to guess what she was saying.
Osamah Sami has a couple of memorable characters, even
bringing some empathy to an authorised officer who is trying his best just to
do his job.
Eryn Jean Norvill is a chameleon, as always, bringing to
life at least three distinct characters, traversing the dramatically different
tones of the different writers’ works.
Marg Horwell’s design seems simple enough to begin with,
three sets of concrete stairs descending to train platforms, feeding people directly
into train carriages. But the modular set slides and moves, giving us different
perspectives, time and time again. Paul Jackson’s lighting is evocative, even
when creating the bright fluorescent light that we expect on public transport.
While I would have preferred if the writers had pushed past these
“characters as types”, the stories they told evoked a Melbourne I recognise and
have experienced. At least from the perspective of having seen these kinds of
people on trains.
From the shared experience of a train stopping in the middle
of the line without knowing what’s happening to over-hearing racism or seeing
violence or being uncomfortable around people clearly under the influence, this
show knows Melbourne. Captures it.
Under the surface, crowds jammed together, hurtling from the
outer-suburbs into the city, their concerns are similar – even if “economic
anxiety” means different things to different people. Even if “this is my
country” sounds different, feels different, depending whose mouth it is coming
out of.
The concerns of Anthem are much the same as Who’s
Afraid of the Working Class. Not much has changed in two decades. But the stories
aren’t quite the same. The cast is more diverse. Reality seems more complicated
in 2019. And the writers are now some of the leading arts practitioners in this
country.
This is a bold, layered, cerebral work that made me think
and made me feel things viscerally but kept me at a distance emotionally. Or perhaps
that’s because I was sitting up in the circle of the Playhouse and just felt so
far away.
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| Photos: Pia Johnson |
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