Extracts from press reviews of
Norm and Ahmed and
Rooted in Australia, the United States and England.
Griffen Foley, Daily Telegraph, 10 April 1968
Buzo has something real and immediate to say about Australian attitudes. He makes the audience uneasy about the unperceptiveness of an ‘average’ Aussie confronted by a well-mannered, educated Pakistani student. Norm parades many of the proper, accepted attitudes which... are shot through the fabric of the Australian character. Again Buzo makes us uneasy by demonstrating that some of our attitudes are shams.
Rex Cramphorn, Bulletin, 30 August 1969
When I first saw
Rooted at a PACT reading it was about an ineffectual young husband (Bentley) and his errant wife (Sandy) in the context of old schoolmates, surf lifesaving clubs, chunder and fluff. The plays remarkable originality lay in its implicit suggestion that language is an exact coefficient of life—the characters are shown literally living their banal obscenities and slang rituals. The observed dialogue is funny, but the lives involved are still ‘rooted’. So when the second-last scene ended with, ‘What shall we drink to?’—‘Bugger all’, I expected a last scene of group sexuality (Sandy and the three men in the cast) to represent the collapse of Bentley’s last vestiges of individuality and affection for Sandy. Instead the last scene was a despondent morning-after-the-night-before which left me feeling cheated of an essential element of the action.
This Jane Street production gives it a good deal more than a new ending. Rearrangements, cutting and lots of new dialogue change the shape and, to some extent, the intention of the whole play. The introduction of a second girl reduces the Bentley-Sandy relationship while the concentration of attention on the off-stage super-mate, Simmo, who always wins the fights and gets the birds, turns the play into a sarcastic comment on the nature and power structures of ‘mateship’—the closely personal look at a weak man drowning in his environment has been sacrificed to a rather more conventional playwriting point of view.
The new version is still a very good play. It is certainly a neater and more efficient dramatic structure... I hope Mr Buzo will not leave it at this stage of its development; here are further possibilities, yet to be realised, in the original draft.
Katharine Brisbane, Australian, 28 November 1970
Buzo is at his best in the one-act play pursuing a simple idea to a single conclusion and allowing himself to play upon the variations of an idea ...
The first thing
Norm and Ahmed does is set Australia for the first time in an Asian setting. The second thing is to define with a terrifyingly funny accuracy the Australian’s aggressive-defensive attitude to life.
Ted Robinson’s production... is deliberately exaggerated to ensure that nothing of Norm’s one-eyed opinions, uncertain judgements or sentimental expressions is lost to the viewer. What struck me for the first time, however, was a moving sense of alienation in both characters.
Ahmed is the alien, frightened by his strange element and anxious not to offend; but Norm, it soon emerges, has spent his whole life in an alien environment and does not understand it any better than Ahmed. And he can’t do much about it except go out and kick a stranger ...
Norm and Ahmed is quite an important little play because of the density of its thought and language. It is also very funny.
The ending is still not quite right but through John Clayton’s performance Norm shows himself as something much more dangerous than the Barry Humphries’ barrel of clichés for which he was taken.
Eliot Norton, Record American, Boston, 26 January 1972
Rooted is a strange free-form farce about a man doomed to lose, deliriously funny and, at the same time, deadly serious. To appreciate it fully would probably require an elaborate glossary of Aussie slang, which seems to be more picturesque than Cockney English. To enjoy it in its American premiere by the Hartford Stage Company, the playgoer needs no more than a liberated sense of humour and a passionate devotion to all those men of good will and bad luck who are habitually rooted, or uprooted, or booted by the frauds, the phonies, the predators and the perennial winners ...
Rooted is a black comedy, or, to borrow a line from another playwright, it is ‘a farce to make you sad’. It jeers at the optimists of the world, who, like Bentley, believe in love and friendship, and at the same time, at the smiling cynics and opportunists who take advantage of them. It reduces to a kind of sad pipe dream the belief that modern man can live by the old golden rule while lacerating with the whip of Mr Buzo’s wit the smiling enemies of innocence.
Bob Ellis, Nation Review, 20–26 May 1972
I liked the way the play
Rooted showed how we go through cycles of roles in life (artist, swaggie, advertising man, public servant, cuckold, bum, apprentice mogul) but our friends stick with us, until we actually fail, and then they cast us out.
Other people will like it for other reasons. There’s a great deal in it, and it has to be the best written Australian play I’ve seen.
Katharine Brisbane, Australian, 27 May 1972
The new production of
Rooted raises a number of interesting questions. It is a good production... and tackles in a firmly naturalistic manner head-on, the problems raised by this totally original style...
At one level we have a complete cartoon of the world of the young middle-class Sydney man. On another we have the author’s criticism of it; on still another the familiar persecution nightmare which at some time has enveloped all of us.
As punishment for being so boring, acquisitive and pathetic, Bentley has everything taken from him bit by bit—his home unit, his wife, his status. The last we see of him is a borrowed blanket being thrown out the door.
It is a very witty play and the audiences who are packing it are in ecstasies of joy over the code language. But there are problems which neither the Melbourne nor the Sydney productions solve and which are leading me to the belief that a whole new approach to the treatment of plays like this is needed...
Buzo has not in this early play solved all the problems of style which he has set himself but there is a precision in the rhythm of the writing which demands a new approach to orchestration. Behind the apparently rambling scenes there is a backbone of formality. For example, there are two almost identical scenes in which two unexpected guests catch Bentley at a disadvantage. When embarrassment reaches its height the couple hastily make their departure incanting over the unfortunate Bentley a liturgy of aphorisms. In the Melbourne production this was done formally, in the Sydney production naturalistically. Neither really worked because the emphasis was placed on the situation rather than the words.
Phrases such as: don’t let it get you down; live it up; have a bash; play it cool; are only approximations of language. We are not used to listening to them. What writers like Buzo and Kenna are doing so well is to make us listen. But we will only listen if the actor shows us how.
Thomas Schick, Nation, 10 June 1972
Max Phipps stands out with his portrayal of Bentley, the public servant. In his hands the character acquires a sense of vulnerability and lostness and so gains our sympathy much more than Buzo’s writing would, in fact, warrant ...
Mr Buzo has a knack for the Australian vernacular, for the trivia of life, for the empty small-talk between man and man, between men and women. The trouble is that he doesn’t know what to do with this technique.
Rooted is a series of emotional and/or satirical vignettes, each having precious little to do with its neighbour. The first sequence is the most promising, with Bentley, wife and friend discussing the house-warming party. Sharp dialogue, painfully recognisable platitudes work for good effect. Suddenly the tone changes ...
The first half is written purely for laughs, for cruel laughs at that. Buzo shows no interest in his people, or understanding and compassion for them. Granting that some of us live that way, it’s still not enough to show only the superficial layer of existence. For meaningful, constructive art there must be concern and a need to understand.
In the second half, without bothering to tell us what has caused the change, Bentley is a drop-out from the rat race. He becomes fully reliant on his ‘protective’ circle of mates who in the end discard him and we leave him all alone in a presumably alien world. While the second half is more dramatic in content, with fewer laughs, it has absolutely nothing to do with the first half. It could well be another play using the same people, or the same names. First half, second half, or the two together,
Rooted says very little beyond the story line which seems culled from numerous fashionable synopses adapted at random for the Australian scene—the marital bickering of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the ambivalent hierarchies of Deathwatch and Fortune and Men’s Eyes, the ‘inspirations’ from
Waiting for Godot, the theatre-of-the-absurd touches in the ‘friends’. It’s all there except compassion and care.
Mr Buzo has the technical expertise for a writer for the stage. Time will tell whether the fashionable playwright with the fashionable means will turn into a worthwhile one as well.
H. G. Kippax, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 September 1973
The Front Room Boys of 1969 is, despite its satirical flights of eloquently patterned dialogue, an inflated and eventually tedious thesis exercise; and Macquarie of 1971, a departure, finds him groping, not very rewardingly, beneath the surfaces of social relationships towards the mysteries of human temperament and motivation. As yet Mr Buzo is too doctrinaire a social critic to be able to dramatise complexity.
This limitation may explain what is unsatisfactory about his first short play,
Norm and Ahmed (1967). Yet it deserves its place in this volume not only because it brought him his first success but also because with it he announced, with considerable theatrical bravura, the stance from which, with a peculiar blend of detachment and fascination, he sees—or imagines he sees—his world...
The play is a study in covert aggression, tautly effective in its earlier stretch in suggesting menaces... The menace established, the play idles along as Mr Buzo anthologises, through Norm’s compulsion to explain himself (an Australian trait?) the various kinds of prejudice, incomprehension, self-deception and insecurity which have launched so many sociological or psychological theses... The play becomes a thesis, the less convincing as drama because the stalled and static Ahmed speaks like a Peter Sellers character. The theatrical outbreak of violence at the end has something of the smug finality of QED.
The play’s strength is in the accuracy of its ear for jargon, cliché, platitude and evasion and the force of critical implication in the way these are patterned to make each point. Norm and Ahmed belongs to the theatre if only because, thesis notwithstanding, it becomes in the acting so vivid a demonstration of its generalised propositions about behaviour.
Rooted is Mr Buzo’s best play to date. Here the targets are Norm’s successor-generation, indubitably middle class, and the affluent worlds of the fast motor car, the surf club, the avant-garde art gallery, the wholesale-retail market place—and brilliantly Mr Buzo cartoons them in sustained passages in which his ear for jargon reinforces his eye for the conventions and compulsions of group behaviour.
In
Rooted the group is all; and it is because his hero, Bentley, the civil servant, with outdated and misplaced faith in mateship and the values of the old school tie, and in superannuation and the security of his unit and its electronic trappings, can find no acceptance in his chosen group with its opportunistic rationale, that he is systematically destroyed.
... it is perhaps because it is a nightmare that the reservations one has about the puppets in Norm and Ahmed and other plays seem less relevant. True, the destruction of Bentley is schematic, and he himself jerks mechanically, mindlessly and bloodlessly, like any puppet, as Mr Buzo methodically pulls a string, presses a switch, probes a nerve, to show how he thinks it is.
But we don’t look for psychology in
The Importance of Being Earnest (where also a ‘world’ lives wholly in terms of a language honed as a weapon against reality and responsibility) or in any other fairy story. Rooted is a fairy story, the nastier because its torture rooms vibrate with echoes from the more tawdry or predatory streets of our world of common day.
Charles Lewsen, The Times, London, January 1976
Alexander Buzo’s witty and powerful short play presents an encounter between two men in a Sydney park at midnight. With the one overtly aggressive and the other courteous in the face of determined provocation, it feels at first like an Australian
Zoo Story. However, while Albee cast light on a disturbed fifties New York by showing an individual forced into violence that is apparently not his nature, Mr Buzo arrives at a study of individual paranoia via a piling up of stereotypes; and then he shocks us by showing his characters behave precisely as we would in the first place have expected them to do.
In an extended piece of shadow boxing, Norm, a veteran of the Second World War, reveals, by condescension born of fear, his firm support of the White Australia Policy... And Gregory de Polnay delivers a line in praise of Norm’s daughter with enough emphasis to suggest that the man is the victim of incestuous longings, and with enough restraint to prevent this becoming a too easy key to the mystery of an unhappy personality.
Darien Angadi plays a Pakistani student who has imposed on himself the task of imbibing a liberal education at Sydney University and of abiding the condescending insults of white Australians—all as preparation for returning to his own country and there bringing about social revolution. Mr Angadi nicely balances courtesy and wit, so that, to the end, one cannot tell for certain whether the young man will end up as Fidel Castro or Uncle Tom.
Suzanne Spunner, Theatre Australia, March–April, 1977
Norm and Ahmed was staged in the car park outside La Mama against the tin fence... Cliff Ellen managed to make Norm’s most innocuous question pregnant with imminent aggression and implicit racism: a sense of foreboding aggression is built up not merely verbally, in the words or the tone in which they are spoken, but rather in the ambiguous gestures of mateship; the too-heavy handshake, the too-emphatic slap on the back and the too-insistent staring into the other’s eyes; the suggestion of questionable intimacy and unconscious homosexual overtones. The acting portrayed this invasion of privacy superbly without overstating its case.
In the final moments of the play Norm, with no warning or obvious provocation, turns on Ahmed. The violence which erupts is horrifying and shocking. One’s first response is to wonder where it came from, then instantly we are drawn back to the clues in Norm’s character and realise the latent menace was always present, and it would only be a question of time before it was unleashed.
Norm and Ahmed has not dated, one only need consider the racist overtones of the press coverage of the recent ‘Paks’ cricket tour to realise how little things have really changed, irrespective of the demise of the White Australia Policy.