Cold Light adapted by
Alana Valentine, based on the novel by
Frank Moorhouse. The Street Theatre, Canberra, March 4-18, 2017.
Director:
Caroline Stacey
Designers: Set –
Maria T Reginato; Costumes –
Imogen Keen; Lighting –
Linda Buck; Sound –
Kimmo Vennonen; Movement –
Zsuzsi Soboslay; Voice Coach –
Dianna Nixon.
Cast:
Sonia Todd as Edith
Tobias Cole as Ambrose / ASIO man / Party Goer 3
Gerard Carroll as Richard / Thomas / John Latham / Victor Hall / Party Goer 1
Craig Alexander as Trevor Gibson / Fred Berry / Tock / Eisenhower
Kiki Skountzos as Janice Linnett / Amelia / Woman
Nick Byrne as Robert Menzies PM / Scraper / Gough Whitlam / Waiter / George T. McDowell, Yihzar, Party Goer 2
Reviewed by
Frank McKone
March 4
This
production is a bravura attempt at a very difficult task. On opening
night, in contrast with the conventional whoops and whistles at curtain
call (a quite recently developed Australian
de rigeur tradition
even for straight plays), for large chunks of time during the
performance the audience paid close attention but without too much
emotional engagement, except for an occasional laugh.
The play
begins in 1950 Canberra, a greenfields location selected before World
War I for the nation’s capital, deliberately distant from both the
competing major state capitals – Melbourne and Sydney – and still hardly
developed. I first visited in 1956 and watched cows being herded along
Northbourne Avenue between the Melbourne and Sydney Buildings. As
Edith quipped, on Page 3 of the script, “...in Canberra one can enjoy
the privileges and discomfort of three modes of living in one place –
the capital, the rural life and exile.” That got arguably the biggest
laugh of the night, from an audience perhaps including a number of
experienced DFAT people. [That’s Department of Foreign Affairs and
Trade, which in the play was still known as External Affairs – a title
with appropriate innuendoes, according to Edith’s experiences.]
The
character, Edith, appears to be entirely fictional, in this last part
of her life until her death, shot by a sniper in Beirut in 1974.
To
understand the play, and appreciate the complexity of Alana Valentine’s
task in adapting Moorhouse’s 719 page novel (which I’ve never read),
here is a neat intro from
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13056789-cold-light
It
is 1950, the League of Nations has collapsed and the newly formed
United Nations has rejected all those who worked and fought for the
League. Edith Campbell Berry, who joined the League in Geneva before the
war, is out of a job, her vision shattered. With her sexually
unconventional husband, Ambrose [posted to the British Embassy]
, she comes back to Australia to live in Canberra.
Edith
now has ambitions to become Australia's first female ambassador, but
while she waits for a Call from On High, she finds herself caught up in
the planning of the national capital and the dream that it should be 'a
city like no other'. [In the play, the design by Walter Burley and
Marion Mahoney Griffin, which won the 1912 competition, plays a major
role. Edith supports PM Menzies to include the Griffins’ plan for a
lake – now Lake Burley Griffin.]
When her communist brother,
Frederick, turns up out of the blue after many years of absence, she
becomes concerned that he may jeopardise her chances of becoming a
diplomat. It is not a safe time to be a communist in Australia or to be
related to one, but she refuses to be cowed by the anti-communist
sentiment sweeping the country. [Menzies was forced constitutionally
in 1951 to hold a referendum which sought approval for the federal
government to ban the Communist Party of Australia. It was not carried. [
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_referendum,_1951_(Communists_and_Communism)]
It
is also not a safe time or place to be 'a wife with a lavender
husband'. After pursuing the Bloomsbury life for many years, Edith finds
herself fearful of being exposed. Unexpectedly, in mid-life she also
realises that she yearns for children. When she meets a man who could
offer not only security but a ready-made family, she consults the Book
of Crossroads and the answer changes the course of her life.
It’s
the details of how her life changes that makes the play seem
interminable as Edith leaves the cross-dresser but sexually amusing
Ambrose after he is recalled to London, marries Richard (whose sexual
behaviour is conventional, but gross), and bit by bit over 24 years
works her way up through the Conservative Prime Ministerships of
Anglophile and Canberra town planner Robert Menzies (1949-1966);
Harold Holt who drowned ‘in accidental circumstances on 17 December 1967’ [
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Holt] (1966-1967);
John McEwen (1967); John Gorton (1968-1970); William [Billy] McMahon (1971-72);
and
finally Labour's Gough Whitlam (1972-1975), who recognises Edith’s
competence in international affairs, makes her an ‘eminent person’ and
sends her off with Victor Hall to find out “whether we can trust the
Non-Proliferation Treaty”.
On this trip, Hall, faced with the
fact that ‘Secrecy about their nuclear weapons is part of the Israeli
military and diplomatic strategy’, arranges as a ‘guest of the Israeli
Defence Force’ to visit Beirut, during the ‘First Lebanese War’ called
‘Operation Peace for Galilee’ (1972-75)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Lebanon_War .
Edith:
“Oh, I’d love to come to see Beirut again. I was there before the war,
the Second World War. Back then I spent many nights in the Kit Kat
Club.” As they drive “even though we are in a non-military vehicle”,
four shots are fired. Edith dances in turn, between shots, with the
communists Fred and Janice, and then with her first husband Ambrose,
saying after the third shot:
“...It’s not what the world hands
you, but what you try to wrest from it. That is all that is valuable.
To act, to speak, to make. To live, to live, to live it. Your
allegiance must be to the republic of the mind, not to any country or
state. The republic of the mind is worth ...
A final shot.
... everything.”
This
should be, and to some extent was, a powerful ending. The production,
in terms of the set design, costume design, sound design and acting of
the key roles by Sonia Todd and Tobias Cole as Edith and Ambrose was top
class. Lighting was over-fussy, and as a result sometimes missed its
mark; while set changes – for the 9 scenes in Act One and 11 scenes in
Act Two – slowed the action down far too much, and were often quite
confusing as actors apparently in role moved sections of the backdrop
and brought furniture and props on and off, some times in dimmed pauses
but often while other action was going on.
The script ($10 with
the full production details, published by Currency Press) states “This
production runs for approximately 140 minutes including an interval” while The Street's web page says 2 hours 40 minutes.
But opening night started a little after the advertised time of 7.30pm
and finished close to 10.30pm. That’s about 3 hours rather than 2 hours 40 minutes. By then the potential power had been dissipated.
Was
this just first night? Will the run see a 20 minute speed
improvement? Or are there questions about the directing and/or the
writing?
This is where things get difficult for a reviewer.
Interestingly, the original novel seems to have attracted a wide range
of opinions. Most are encouraged by a rare Australian novel making the
attempt to cover our history in this way. Some make a great deal out of
the story of a woman taking such an initiative in the League of
Nations, and bemoaning her treatment in the Public Service back home in
Australia.
But, of course, we all have biasses in making judgements on artistic work. Since reviewing Alana Valentine’s
Letters to Lindy (August 2016) and her
MP
(October 2011), I am naturally biassed in her favour. At the same
time, not having read Frank Moorhouse, I am a bit concerned about the
quality of Alana’s source material, particularly after finding this
comment on the goodreads website by Karen Leopoldina (I hope she doesn’t
mind me quoting):
an impressive opening, and the ending still
lingers, but what about those 700 odd pages in between? weight is what i
think of with this book: its physical mass matched by the weight of all
that research which mired the narrative into a sludge that was almost
inert at times. i love history, and i love books which use invented
characters and places them in the midst of a real historical context.
but research needs to be worn lightly, and this indeed mr moorhouse does
not do. oh not indeed. this reader, at least, felt bludgeoned at times
as his characters seemed merely mouthpieces for various ideas that
concerned its author. but despite my qualms about narrative pace, and
whether i was engaged by any of the characters – the central character
of Edith Berry was particularly unconvincing, least of all as a woman – i
was still impressed by the intellectual scope and ambition of this
book. it is so rare in australia to read a book of ideas: even rarer to
find a writer who dares to write one.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13056789-cold-light
I
had similar thoughts after 3 hours rather than ‘700 odd pages’, so I
wonder if the play needed to find a better way to limit its scope and
focus. Maybe, though the surrounding set design was visually terrific,
the staging could have been done much more simply, with, say, three lit
areas on an open stage where Edith would move between – a cafe table, a
desk, a lounge – with little other furniture (except the cumquats, I
guess). Then there would be no need for physical set changes,
characters would appear from upstage centre, left or right to interact
with Edith and depart. The sound track would tell us what we needed to
know – such as the sound of the car driving into Beirut and the gun
shots.
Instead of what seemed to be a mix of naturalism and
stylisation, a minimal setting would opt for consistent stylisation,
which the dialogue as I read it in the text seems to require. The
action would flow more smoothly (and quickly).
And perhaps then
my feeling that some lengthy speeches and drawn out sequences needed
cutting (such as Ambrose’s too long mime in drag), might have been
allayed. Then, too, the sections of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poem, spoken
from a fixed microphone (without it needing to be mysteriously moved
about the stage by other characters) could have been used with a clearer
purpose. Since it began the play, it could be used to bookend each Act
– perhaps in Brechtian or Tennessee Williams style, with the words and
the author’s name projected for us to read as Edith spoke. Not everyone
nowadays has read, or maybe even heard of Adam Lindsay Gordon.
The idea of presenting
Cold Light
is well worthwhile and even an important contribution to Australian
theatre, so I would like to see it better focussed and structured
dramatically.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
