2023: This Rough Magic by Helen Machalias

 

 

 This Rough Magic by Helen Machalias.  Produced by The Street at The Street Theatre, Canberra, November 10-19, 2023.  Published by Currency Press 2023.


Reviewed by Frank McKone
Opening night November 11

Creatives
Director – Beng Oh
Dramaturgs – Dr Rebecca Clode and Granaz Moussavi
Production Design – Imogen Keen
Lighting Design – Gerry Corcoran; Sound Design – Kyle Sheedy
Cultural Consultants – Sheida Jafari and Parastoo Seif
Stage Manager – Brittany Myers

Cast
Prospero – George Kanaan; Miranda – Kaitlin Nihill
Ariel – Reza Momenzada; Caliban – Andre Le
Dive-Shop Owner/The Official/Parnia – Lainie Hart



This Rough Magic is a worthy play about the ethics of the treatment by Australia of asylum seekers arriving by boat.  Though the playscript has potential, only a little of the magic made it through to us.  The style of presentation needs the rough smoothed off before I could say that the play is as good as it would like to be.

Helen Machalias has turned the island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, stolen from Caliban and his mother Sycorax, by Prospero, with his daughter Miranda, into Christmas Island – famous for its huge population of crabs – where Australia has detained refugees off-shore, preventing them from being treated as they should be under the 1951 Refugee Convention (ratified in 1954).

In this story, Prospero and Miranda end up seeking to go to a perfect life in Australia, perhaps themselves having arrived in a storm in Flying Fish Cove, just like others from Iran who are ship-wrecked as the play begins in a storm.  Prospero “tries to command the waves using his staff”, and fails.  Flying Fish Cove, after all, is real, as are the ship-wrecked refugees.

Prospero hands back the island to the local resident, Caliban, since the island is no longer the idyllic place for settlement.

As the play begins, the script says:

A microphone in a stand is on stage. PROSPERO enters, wearing a cloak and holding a staff and book.

PROSPERO:  It begins, as always, with a storm.  Sit still, and hear of my sea-sorrow.

    What follows [ie the rest of the play] is an account of PROSPERO, MIRANDA and ARIEL’S arrival     on the island told from multiple perspectives.  The storm reaches a crescendo.  Lines overlap                  throughout the scene in the chaos.  Sirens sound continually.

    Ensemble cast enters, including CALIBAN, running and holding a machete.

I had followed my usual approach to a new play.  I had avoided reading much about it and had not looked at the script even though we were provided with the full Currency publication in the foyer.

I recognised Prospero, knowing that “this rough magic I here abjure” was quoted from The Tempest, but Caliban appeared as a perfectly good-looking modern teenage boy, complaining about his mother’s injunctions to behave properly while armed with a machete.

I cottoned on that the girl was probably Prospero’s daughter Miranda, but I never realised that the other character in Scene One was a Dive-Shop Owner touting for tourists to come diving in Flying Fish Cove.

At the end of the scene, I understood how things were going a bit better when some one who was obviously an Australian politician on the microphone talked about having to tell the Prime Minister about “the information that babies had died”.

By the end of Act One, at interval, I had to scrabble around to skim the playscript, largely because I could hardly understand any of the male characters’ speeches because most were shouted and not enunciated clearly.  I would call the style of presentation ‘loud staccato’.  

When I read the words, I could see that better characterisation, especially for Prospero, but often also for Ariel as the refugee father, needed much more range of voice quality and clarity of pronunciation to allow us to have empathy and understanding – which is where the magic would be.

Something of that magic came through the choreography, especially of the Iranian family distraught at their child’s death, and at times for Ariel where he is rather like Shakespeare’s Ariel, and in the relationship between Caliban and Miranda (very different from in Shakespeare’s play); but it took that peek at the Act Two script to make better sense after interval.

Perhaps the problem in the directing of the actors was that the excitement of the chaos of the storm in Scene One overtook too much of the rest of the performance.  Looking back at The Tempest, it’s true that Prospero treated Caliban as an over-the-top dictatorial figure, and even treats Miranda harshly, until near the end  he begins to understand that he should treat people ‘kindlier’, and abjure his ‘magic’.

For example in Machalias’ play, in Act One Scene Two, where Prospero tells Miranda how she should deal with being interviewed to show that she is a genuine refugee,  George Kenaan needed to be quieter and softly persuasive when she has said

MIRANDA:  Our prayer centre was attacked.  They imprisoned our leaders. Sufis were banned from government jobs, so my father couldn’t work---

and PROSPERO says: Too much detail.  Don’t make it political.  Focus on your education, how it impacted you as a child.

I lost the detail of their situation as Moslems, and the sympathy I should have felt, because of the loud staccato manner, particularly on Kenaan’s part.

From a different perspective, the stage design, sound design and lighting are all very successful in moving the scenes along, but better clues could be given in the costumes or props as to what each character was – for example, an MP sign for Chris Bowen; a PRESS sign for the journalist; a PM sign for Scott Morrison; a clipboard for the Official; a diving item like a flipper held by the dive-shop owner.

Overall, then, the concept of the play is interesting, the intention of criticising refugee policy is worthy, but there is more to be done to make the presentation more effective.

©Frank McKone, Canberra