1. Introducing the Plays
Norm and Ahmed
and
Rooted
(first performed in 1968 and 1969) are the two earliest plays of a playwright who has established himself as one of the most gifted of that younger generation of Australian writers attracted to the theatre in the late 1960s and 1970s. Alexander Buzo has now had a dozen plays—on a wide range of contemporary themes—performed by the main professional companies and little theatres throughout Australia, and many of them have been performed outside Australia (in England and the United States) as well.
Yet his work has not been without its detractors. His verbal flair and comic vitality, and his capacity for sharply-edged social comment, have been generally acknowledged; but he has also been criticised as deficient in skills of construction and characterisation. The ending of Norm and Ahmed, for example—on which so much of the play’s effect depends—has been seen as arbitrary, insufficiently motivated by anything that occurs earlier in the play. And Bentley, the protagonist of
Rooted, has been seen as an inadequate characterisation. A more realistic presentation, it has been argued, might have made him less helpless and passive, less willing to acquiesce in his own humiliation and defeat.
Criticisms like these are based on the assumption that Buzo is striving after realism in his plays, and failing to achieve it. If they were correct, the plays would indeed be badly flawed. It may be, however, that the assumption itself is wrong. A great deal of fine drama has been written according to this naturalistic formula—according, that is, to criteria which make verisimilitude (the naturalness with which real life is represented on stage) the dominant aim of a play’s action, characterisation and speech, and of its set design, lighting and costuming. One of Australia’s best known plays, Ray Lawler’s
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955), was a major achievement in this mode, and it remains important in the work of dramatists like David Williamson.
Our habit of thinking about and judging plays in such terms is so ingrained that it may seem difficult, if not self-evidently absurd, to think about them in any other terms. Yet a moment’s reflection about drama—about any art—might make us aware that this is a very partial, incomplete view of the range of effects which many different kinds of drama have achieved in the past, and continue to achieve, through methods that are not tied to the literal or documentary representation of reality at all. Some of the main theatrical conventions of Shakespearean drama—the playing of female roles by boy-actors, the use of poetry and the habit of having the actors address the audience through soliloquies—are quite implausible, according to real-life criteria. The use of a chorus in the great Greek tragedies, both to comment on and add emotional depth to the main action, is also a non-realistic or stylised device in such plays. In twentieth century painting, to take an example from a very different art form, the representational aesthetic has been almost wholly eclipsed by forms of painting ranging from various distortions of reality, to pure abstraction, in which no ‘real world’ is recognisable at all.
Alexander Buzo has on occasion disassociated himself from readings and productions of his plays which interpret them primarily as literal representations of reality, insisting that they are not
‘documentaries’, but
‘works of fiction... intended to work on the audience’s imagination’. Rejecting the labels of realist or social realist, he has related his drama to a general impulse, in modern theatre, away from the conventional means by which naturalism structured its apparently plausible, life-like actions: I would like to think that we are moving away from the well-plotted, well-made exposition-climax-denouement kind of form into a new and freer style where the structure of a play is dictated by the energies of what is being expressed.’
Comic techniques and effects are important in the ‘freer style’ Buzo develops in plays like
Norm and Ahmed and
Rooted. His imagination draws on many traditional comic methods of deforming or transforming the real world, and on recent techniques of the absurd, to produce his characteristic effects of surprise, humour and shock: exaggeration of speech or behaviour; an emphasis on the character type, rather than on the individual, defined by some mannerism or obsession irrationally pursued (Norm and all the characters of
Rooted are comic characters in this sense); and an emphasis, in the structuring of his plays, on comic or bizarre contrasts between one scene or incident and the next, between types of language, and between different characters. (Simmo and Hammo in
Rooted, and Norm and Ahmed are examples of characters deliberately contrasted in this way.) Comedy achieves its effects precisely through its ways of disrupting what we might normally expect to happen or to be said, in a particular situation. Effects of these kinds, throughout Buzo’s plays, are complemented by his interest in introducing unusual visual or audio-visual images into his plays: the use of Sandy’s voice in the tape-recorder in
Rooted, or the odd setting—the scaffolding, white fence and wire mesh of the construction site—in
Norm and Ahmed.
We need also to remember, in considering the comic elements in Buzo’s drama, that comedy throughout its history has provided dramatists with a medium for serious statements about life. The spectacle of people behaving absurdly or irrationally, even as we laugh at it, invites us to ponder the gap between the way the world is, and the way we would like it to be—to reflect on the human capacity for self-deception, or on social abuses and evils. The eighteenth-century writer Horace Walpole once wrote, in a famous definition, that
‘This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel. Buzo’s plays also generate this thought-provoking quality of detachment, forcing us to think about the predicaments of his characters, and to ponder the issues which his comic mode of presenting them raises. His plays do not offer us exact reproductions or reflections of our society, but imaginatively heightened images of our social behaviour, using effects of surprise and shock to force us into disturbing recognitions.
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