Norm and Ahmed is a
particularly good example of Buzo’s desire to move away from ‘the
well-plotted, well-made exposition-climax-denouement kind of form into
a new and freer style’. In this one-actor there is no plot, in any
conventional sense, and very little action until the explosive moment
of physical violence on which the play concludes. This is not to say
that the play lacks a structure. Its basic aim is to create suspense
about Norm’s motivations, to intensify the audience’s uneasiness about
how the encounter between Norm and Ahmed will end—playing on the humour
of the situation but increasingly undermining it in a pattern which
might best be described as a rhythm of alternately heightened and
relaxed tensions, as we follow the ebb and flow of the emotional
undercurrents between the two characters.
These transitions of mood and feeling are crucial in the developing
momentum of the play. An atmosphere of uncertainty is created right at
the beginning—well before anything is actually said—simply through the
oddness of Norm’s behaviour: his restless movements in a strange
setting at an unusual hour (midnight) and, especially, his puzzling
action in throwing his cigarette away and putting another in his mouth,
unlit, as the stranger approaches. There are several other moments,
spaced throughout the play prior to its climax, in which significant
action triggers a shift in mood—in each case injecting uncertainty into
the play and intensifying our sense of menacing suspense. For example,
as the initial tensions of the encounter relax, there is a sudden shift
(p. 9), when Norm abruptly turns on Ahmed, re-enacting in fantasy his
violent treatment of the German prisoner-of-war. Almost immediately
afterwards Norm offers Ahmed a cigarette, apparently as a gesture of
apology, lighting it for him with his own cigarette lighter. But this
apparently innocent recovery of good humour is a profoundly unsettling
moment for Ahmed, since he becomes aware at this point that Norm’s
initial reason for stopping him (‘Got a light?’, p. 3) was a ruse
masking some other intention.
Actions like these are all of the simplest kind, but they demonstrate
Buzo’s skill in controlling the pace and rhythm of the play. The
physical attack on Ahmed at the end of the play is thus less
‘arbitrary’, less unpredictable, than it might initially appear, and it
creates an image of race prejudice as a profoundly irrational force in
the behaviour of ordinary Australians. One of the most disturbing
aspects of the play is that Norm knows all the ‘arguments’ for racial
tolerance. His mind is saturated with a liberal-minded rhetoric of
tolerance, goodwill, neighbourliness and respect for the rights of
others:
We’re forging the bonds of friendship with our Asian neighbours.
Knowledge is the key to the door of understanding and friendship. (p.
11)
... we’ve got to learn to understand the problems of others and not
worry too much about our own... In this world there’s too many blokes
getting in for their chop and not worrying
about their mates. (pp.
17-18)
But it is, for Norm, merely a rhetoric, a set of clichés and slogans
masking and rationalising deep-seated resentments which the play
ultimately brings to the surface, as the veneer of polite or friendly
talk gradually disintegrates.
The play’s dialogue reinforces this image of underlying hostility and
irrationality. Although the various speech registers used in the play
are rooted in the actual speech habits of ordinary Australians like
Norm, and outsiders like Ahmed, Buzo’s aim is not simply to reproduce
that speech in a documentary, but to create imaginative patterns in
order to emphasise comic or disturbing contrasts and ironies.
One of the major ironies in the play, for example, is that Ahmed, the
foreigner, speaks from Norm’s point of view in better English than that
of the average Australian: a brand of cultivated, literary English
which for Norm is a deeply threatening sign of superior education,
status and intelligence. Norm’s pause, in the following exchange,
introduces this kind of undercurrent into the play:
AHMED: One always experiences difficulties when one is seeking to
adjust to an alien environment. But once the initial period of
adjustment is over, it is easier to acclimatise oneself.
[Pause]
NORM: That’s very true. (p. 5)
Some of the funniest moments in the play are built on this comedy of
misunderstandings, but it also conveys the deeper theme of the crucial
connection between language and identity. For Norm, Ahmed’s ability to
speak educated English so fluently is a threat to his sense of superior
identity as an Australian.
Another significant level of irony occurs within Norm’s speech, in its
comically disconcerted shifts of register between relatively friendly
formality and aggressive familiarity. Much of the comedy of the
language resides in Ahmed’s increasingly baffled uneasiness at these
disconcerting shifts. Often they occur within a particular speech, like
the following, in which the movement from friendly formality to
vigorously colloquial language points to a loss of emotional control,
belying the assumption of fair-mindedness with which it begins:
NORM: It’s nice of you to say that, Ahmed, because these blokes
[Egyptians] were hard to understand. There were faults on both sides,
of course, and there’s two sides to every question, as you well know,
but, well, there it is. I just didn’t take to them. Might have been my
fault. You see, they’re a cunning lot, those Gyppos. Take you down as
soon as look
at you. Some of our blokes were easy pickings for those
bastards. Fruit on the sideboard. That’s what they were. (p. 8)
The image of Norm as an Australian norm—a typical Australian who
embodies the country’s dominant attitudes and myths—is carefully
constructed throughout. At its centre is the belief that all
Australians are basically humane, tolerant and freedom-loving (‘We’re
not such a bad mob out here, you know. We might be a bit on the
rough-and-ready side, but our heart’s in the right place.’ p. 24).
However, it also includes subservience to authority, the belief that
‘important people... blokes in an official capacity’ deserve a little
bit of respect, and Norm lives in awe of a boss who once condescended
to have a drink with him. In addition to his love of such Australian
institutions as sport, Leagues Clubs and the R.S.L., Norm is the
stereotype in his domestic attitudes:
NORM: I’m doing all right for meself. Making a bit of money, got a nice big house, everything laid on, I’m doing fine. (p. 15).
And his sentimental nostalgia for home life and marital bliss is evoked in grotesquely inflated Hollywood clichés:
NORM: Those magic moments that make life seem worthwhile now I sit at home alone and think of yesteryear. (p. 16)
I stop and look up at the stars in the sky and think what a wonderful world it is we live in. (p. 22)
All these attitudes are ironically undermined in the course of the
play, not least through their contrast, as sentimental clichés, with
other tendencies in Norm’s speech. There is a sustained undercurrent of
violence in many of the stories Norm tells, and in the texture and
imagery of much of his slang. Contemptuous racial tags—Gyppos, Krauts,
Chows and Boongs—are part of this violent texture. Early in the play
Norm describes Ahmed as looking ‘as if a kick in the crutch and a cold
frankfurt’d finish you off’ (p. 6); and he describes his encounter with
the German prisoner in such terms as ‘knocked one of ’em down with me
bare hands’, ‘jobbed him one’ and ‘floored this bloody Kraut. Really
laid him out’ (pp. 8-10).
Language like this (and there are many other examples in the play)
reveals how dangerously unstable Norm really is, how close to the
surface is the impulse to lash out and solve problems with the fist, as
he does at the end of the play.
Norm and Ahmed does not offer any solution to the issues it raises so dramatically. In fact much of the grimness of the play’s ending comes from the general insistence that racism like Norm’s can hardly be reached by conventional appeals to reason or decency, and in doing so it challenges one of Australia’s cherished myths: its toleration of people from different cultures and races. Perhaps this larger connotation is symbolically hinted at in the play’s unusual setting: offering an image of Norm, as the self-appointed guardian of white Australian society, on the look-out for those (like Ahmed) which the white fence, with its prison-like mesh-wire top, is designed to keep out.
Norm and Ahmed also offers considerable scope for varied interpretation in production. One of the more interesting questions to be decided would be how far Norm is made to seem an ‘innocent’ character, unaware of the contradictions in his behaviour. Greater or less stress might be put on the motive of loneliness, as a reason for Norm’s being out on the streets looking for someone to talk to—or a foreigner to beat up—at midnight. The scene in which Norm takes out his lighter (according to the stage direction, ‘beamingly benignly’) could be presented, depending on the tone of the production, as a deliberately provocative act on Norm’s part, or an unconscious, innocent act, in which it is assumed that he has genuinely forgotten his ruse at the play’s beginning. The latter emphasis would make for a ‘softer’ production, stressing both the comedy and pathos of Norm’s situation. The former emphasis would require a ‘harder’, more uncompromising production, stressing the blackness of the comedy and the deliberate aggressiveness of Norm’s character. Yet another type of production might try a mixture of these Norms, making the audience’s uncertainty about Norm’s motivation the basic effect aimed at. Each of these Norms would require a different Ahmed, also: a more passive figure, presented as an ‘innocent’ victim, or a more active figure, perhaps ironically goading Norm at certain points in the play. Such differences of emphasis in production would not fundamentally affect the general aim of the play, but they would create a different balancing of the elements of comedy, pathos and shock.