2009: A Stretch of the Imagination by Jack Hibberd

A Stretch of the Imagination by Jack Hibberd.  Performed by John Wood, directed by Denis Moore for HIT Productions at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, Tuesday May 5 to Friday May 8, 8.00pm, Saturday May 9, 2.00pm & 8.00pm. Bookings: 6298 0290

This may sound picky, but this production has a running time of 110 minutes, including interval, according to the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne where it will be seen later in May on its round Australia tour.  Maybe at The Q the interval was half an hour longer, but I don't think so. 

So it wasn't just my imagination that was, legitimately, stretched by Jack Hibberd.  The play consists of a series of vignettes, scenes from Monk O'Neill's apocryphal reminiscences, punctuated by his little rituals on his "penultimate" day, which turns out to be his last.  Wood played for and got the laughs, but kept the pace too even and the transitions from scene to scene too deliberate.  The result stretched my patience, when what I hoped for was a kind of wild unpredictability, a sense of Monk's imagination breaking out of all ordinary bounds, building to the fantastic but quite beautiful imagery of the final sunset which heralds his inevitable end.

Perhaps, too, Moore's direction, in asking for a great deal of physical playing out of Monk's stories, led to slowing down and weakening the emotional effects over the whole length of the play, despite the success of individual scenes. In some other productions of this recognised classic, the words have been more central, allowing the resonance of Hibberd's language to stir up images and feelings directly in the minds of the audience, rather as Barry Humphries does with his Sandy Stone character, who hardly moves within the confines of his decrepit armchair. 

Monk needs to move to carry out his present-time activities, but seemed to me to become too much of a show-off miming and acting out the stories of his past.  I felt less empathy than I wanted to feel, and so less of the sadness underlying his outward bravado came through than I think Monk O'Neill deserves.

Of course, this was my reaction, but Hibberd's character and script still have a great deal to say to us about what it is to be a certain kind of Australian.  Monk's larrikin no bullshit manner and language cannot fail to make us laugh.  And, however picky I am after the event, I certainly enjoyed the awfulness of Monk O'Neill on opening night at The Q, and laughed along with the rest of a highly enthusiastic audience. 

©Frank McKone, Canberra