Born on July 23, 1944, Alex Buzo – playwright, wordsmith, sports raconteur and humorous social commentator – suffered constant pain from the time his cancer was diagnosed in 2001 until his untimely death on August 16, 2006.
In 1971, his play Macquarie was Playtext No 1, opening the batting for the iconic publisher of Australian performing arts, Currency Press. Katharine Brisbane, co-founder of Currency with her husband Philip Parsons, hosted a day-long celebration of Buzo’s life and work last Sunday February 18, which will be remembered as a special day for his immediate and extended theatre family.
We heard readings from a wide range of his works, all showing Buzo’s sensitivity and skill as a writer, yet for me a high point was when his daughter Laura described not only his dedication to his profession as he maintained his deadlines until just three weeks before he died, but especially how – once she had passed through her teenage years when her father, she thought, “just didn’t get it – about anything” – she discovered from his play Coralie Lansdowne Says No how much he really understood about women. “Here you are,” she said to him in his last few days, “surrounded by one wife, three daughters and a female cat.” He opened his eyes briefly. “Unbelievable!” he exclaimed softly.
Buzo’s humanity and humility, balancing his determination and extraordinary control of words, came through every reading and every comment from those who had known and worked with him. It was a very satisfying revelation for me to discover that the compassionate artist I had imagined him to be from reading and teaching his plays was real.
Currency Press offers much more than publishing. From the homepage www.currency.com.au links take you to upcoming public special events, the regular newsletter and features such as Author of the Month – currently Queanbeyan’s Tommy Murphy, whose early work was first noticed in The Canberra Times.
An unexpected Canberra connection began the Buzo celebration. Ned Manning’s first play Us and Them was partly based on his teaching experience at Dickson High School (before it became the recently reprieved Dickson College). I had not remembered that Manning, despite fair skin and blond hair, played the Pakistani Ahmed in Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed, directed by Pat Hutchinson with Colin Vaskess as Norm for Fortune Theatre, Canberra’s first attempt at a permanent professional theatre company. Manning read from Buzo’s late very funny book on professional and social cricket, Legends of the Baggy Green.
Norm and Ahmed, infamous for being banned for obscene language in Queensland and Victoria, became a theme to follow through the day. Manning became a cricketing partner with Buzo after playing Ahmed. Buzo wrote about producing the play in Kuala Lumpur and Mumbai in “Wary Asians on a Theme” (a wordplay on “variations on a theme”) in Quadrant, November 2004, read for us by another daughter Emma, with Eliza Logan and Paul Wilson. Another surprise was the unpublished update of the play, titled Normie and Tuan, read by Harold Hopkins as a Vietnam veteran and dark-skinned Craig Menaud as a young Malaysian studying communications at University of Technology, Sydney, but whose family had been anti-communists in Vietnam.
The original play was based on the real experience of a student friend of Buzo’s, harrassed on purely racist grounds in the 1960s. Normie and Tuan showed the same racism, with the same dissembling Aussie behaviour in the more modern context, and an equally shocking end. But the story of productions in Asia of Norm and Ahmed, with Muslim actors in the role of Ahmed was highly revealing. Where, Buzo wrote, the Pakistani was seen by Australian audiences as the victim of undeserving, gratuitous racism, in Malaysia he became a hero, representing all those family members who had written home about their experiences as students in Australia - except among people of Chinese background who resented his hero status in a country where Malays were legally given employment and other advantages (while the police had to be paid a large “deposit”, only to be refunded if the play was not found to be offensive).
In Mumbai, however, the Indians found Ahmed, a Pakistani, to be “beyond the pale”. All these productions were successful in attracting audiences, but were controversial for very different reasons. Cultural differences also confronted Buzo with the production in Asia of Coralie Lansdowne Says No. Internal characterisation, going back to Ibsen’s works, was not understood and he wrote “the Norwegian sage’s revolution has not reached the East”. I wondered, though, if simple action as a basis for drama is not as much the common understanding here as it is in Hong Kong.
At the end of the day, it was Bob Ellis who, saying Buzo was Australia’s modern Moliere and Sheridan, criticised the critics who had “slammed [the later] plays compared with Buzo’s energetic rival David Williamson”, while it was ironically the Sydney critic John McCallum who thought that Big River and Marginal Farm are rich plays in which the key characters reach a stage of “more than resignation, but of acceptance made in peace, though tinged with melancholy.”
With such an understanding of humanity I found myself agreeing with McCallum that Buzo “will be the one who will survive.” The day was indeed a great celebration of Buzo’s life and work.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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