Rooted, even more than
Norm and Ahmed, offers
bizarre images, comic distortions of reality, in order to make us think
about the situations of its characters and about the issues which their
absurd behaviour raises. Like
Norm and Ahmed, the play
lacks a plot in the conventional sense. Instead of developing to a
climax, in which characters are brought to crucial recognitions about
themselves and their situations, the structure of Rooted traces an
inevitable downward curve in the fortunes of its protagonist, Bentley.
None of the characters (including Bentley) ever comes to an
understanding of his or her situation, and of the system of values to
which they all mindlessly conform:
GARY: Just assert yourself a bit. Throw your weight around. Remember,
in this life it’s up for grabs. You’ve got to go out and get it. (p.
91)
The social system of the play suggests a medieval wheel of fortune, on
which all the characters are trapped. Its extremes of absolute social
success and absolute social failure are measured by the two absent
characters, Simmo and Hammo. The other characters compete with each
other for status, power and possessions, and occupy varying degrees of
ascendancy or decline. The gradual humiliation of Bentley—the main
action of the play, in which he is successively stripped of the
possessions he has prided himself on acquiring (his wife, his home unit
with its admired consumer goods, his job, his friends)—is balanced by
the relative success of the others. Yet success is likely to be as
transient for these characters as it is demonstrated to be for Bentley,
in a system which sacrifices intrinsic values and loyalties for merely
temporary, ego-boosting satisfactions. If
Norm and Ahmed challenges the myth that Australia is a tolerant society,
Rooted challenges the equally
entrenched myth that in Australia the ethic of
competitiveness—competing with others for higher status, more power, a
better job, more admired possessions—is a natural source of personal
freedoms.
Simmo and Hammo embody the drive for status and the fear of failure in
an extreme form. Their absence from the stage (especially that of
Simmo) is one of the most unconventional of the play’s absurdist
devices. Buzo’s aim, with this deliberately non-realistic effect, is to
suggest that Simmo’s domination is primarily psychological. He exists
primarily, that is, as a powerfully motivating illusion in the minds of
the other characters. As such, his influence is shown to pervade every
aspect of their lives. He is the ultimate achiever in the world of big
business, controller of Simmo Enterprises Ltd, a vast, expanding empire
employing the most sophisticated technology and the most up-to-date
concepts. He is also Mr Big, the man whose reputation is so notorious
that policemen and lawyers refuse to take action against him (p. 73),
and an Australian-style John Wayne, taking a back-country Australian
‘hick town’ by storm:
GARY: He backed five winners at the picnic races, floored three locals
in a brawl, demolished a niner, and torpedoed the minister’s daughter.
(p. 77)
In his school days, we learn, Simmo was the bully who ran the
playground (p. 66). And he is also—in this comically inflated composite
image of every character’s dream of power and prestige—a sexual athlete
of immense prowess, irresistibly attractive to women. Simmo’s name,
which (like the names Hammo and Davo) is meant to suggest a typically
Australian nicknaming habit, also suggests a pun on ‘simian’, and an
ironic allusion to man’s evolutionary descent from the ape. Simmo is
the winner, the fittest survivor in a society based purely on
self-assertion, and on the ethic of winner-takes-all. Hammo, on the
other hand, whose name suggests the ham-actor—the out-of-date,
bungling, inexpert performer—is the born loser, the down-and-out that
Bentley is destined to become the victim spurned by the system.
As a fantasy image shared by all the characters, Simmo has a permanence
and stability throughout the play which is in comic contrast to the
actual situations of the other characters. These are marked by their
continually shifting, temporary quality, as allegiances shift and
fortunes change in the frantic drive for success. Buzo draws on many
traditional techniques of high and low comedy, as well as on more
recent techniques of the absurd, to emphasise the rootlessness of his
characters’ lives, their restless pursuit of temporary gratifications.
The steady decline of Bentley’s fortunes is traced through different
phases in the play’s three acts, each of which contains an unusual
mixture of short and longer scenes: four scenes to each act, including
a scene without words. The effect of these variations is to keep
shifting our focus on Bentley (and to a lesser extent, on Sandy): to
see him, in the longer scenes, in relationships with others, and to
focus on him, in the scenes without words, as an increasingly isolated
figure. A composite portrait of Bentley is thus gradually constructed,
revealing his social situation and its bearing on his personal life.
The mixture of short and long scenes varies the pace of the play,
giving it something of an episodic character as it shifts from one
scene, one moment in Bentley’s experience, to another, within the
overall design of a downward curve in his fortunes. It also enables
Buzo to introduce farce-like complications into the actions and
relationships of the minor characters. Six liaisons occur (all within a
period of ten weeks!), in a shifting pattern typical of the comic
action of farce: Sandy-Bentley, Richard-Diane, Simmo-Sandy, Gary-Diane,
Richard-Sandy, Simmo-Diane. And these relationships are complicated by
other rivalries and betrayals: Diane’s jealousy of Sandy; Gary’s and
Richard’s friendship and betrayal of Bentley. The movement of
characters into and out of Bentley’s unit (Acts One and Two) and Gary’s
room (Act Three) also suggests the typically complicated movements of
farce. At the beginning of the play Bentley and Sandy occupy their
unit, and Richard occupies Gary’s room. Subsequently Bentley moves out
of the unit and Simmo moves in; Richard moves out of Gary’s room and
Bentley moves in; Simmo moves out of the unit and Richard moves in; and
finally Bentley moves out of Gary’s room.
These farcical elements, offering a comic image of transient
relationships, are reinforced by the proliferation of comic incidents
throughout. The play’s visual imagery—its inventive use of stage design
and props to illuminate the situations of the characters—is
particularly important. No scene in the play is without examples of
purely theatrical symbolism of this kind. It ranges from the simplest
kind of visual gag—for example, Bentley’s production of a bowl of blue
punch (p. 36), absurdly matching the blue armchairs—to the sustained
symbolism of the decor and furnishings of Bentley’s unit itself. Its
colour scheme of blue and white, and its ostentatious display of
expensive furniture and latest-model sound equipment (stereo, tape
recorder and transistor) suggest a cold, sterile atmosphere, an
obsession with status and appearances. Sandy’s introduction of a vivid
red abstract painting into this setting (p. 44) suggests the passion
which is absent in her relationship with Bentley, and which she seeks
in shifting her attention to Simmo.
Many of the incidents involving Bentley offer images of him as
comically inept, a clown bungling even the simplest of actions. His
inability to keep two tennis balls bouncing on his racquet (p. 35) is
one example. So is the first of his ‘scenes without words’, in which he
throws and misses with all five of the quoits he carries on stage,
while Sandy—dressed in the same sterile white as he is—silently ignores
him as she reads a newspaper. This brief, wordless scene encapsulates
their situation, making its point through its direct visual impact. All
the scenes without words, in fact, typify Buzo’s aim for a ‘freer
style’ of drama, in which the ‘energies of what is being expressed’
generate their own theatrical force, without overt authorial
manipulation: a style in which action is allowed to generate its own
unspoken comment.
Other incidental actions and details inserted into the longer scenes
suggest pure farce. The meat pie dangling from the ceiling (Act Three,
Scene One) is a ludicrous illustration of the pretentious art world to
which Richard belongs, as editor of an underground magazine with the
equally ludicrous title, The Inevitable Tarantula. The third scene of
Act Two opens with a succession of farcical actions by Bentley: he
makes inept attempts to train a hose on the lovers through a peephole
into their bedroom, then aims an air rifle at them, which starts to
‘move up and down, rhythmically’, comically miming the offstage
movements of the lovers in bed. These are old circus-clown gags
(especially the water squirting back into the face of the practical
joker, Bentley), but they are given a new significance here, revealing
Bentley’s inability to fulfil the role of a betrayed husband, and
rendering absurd his sense of outrage. At several points in the play,
also, the tape-recorder which is Bentley’s most recent and proudest
acquisition is ironically made to broadcast Sandy’s voice, abruptly
announcing to him the facts of her bitterness towards him and her
infidelity: ‘Why don’t you shut up?’ (p. 37); ‘Bin having it off with
Simmo.’ (p. 53); and (her final words to him as he leaves the unit),
‘Piss off.’ (p. 74).
If farcical action in
Rooted both comically
characterises and judges the behaviour it depicts (in much the same way
as a cartoonist offers an exaggerated and simplified image of behaviour
in order to make some moral comment about it), the play’s language
continually creates the same effects—defining the characters
(especially Bentley) as victims of empty clichés, unable to communicate
other than superficially with each other. As in Norm and Ahmed, it is
important to recognise that although the language used by the
characters is rooted in the everyday speech habits of most Australians,
the play does not present such speech realistically. At the very
beginning of the play, Buzo builds a comic exchange out of a series of
repetitions, revealing Bentley as a man obsessed with appearances,
totally dependent on the approval of others (especially Sandy):
BENTLEY: You hear that, Sandy? Gary reckons our unit’s immaculate.
SANDY: Yes, I heard.
BENTLEY: You hear that, Sandy? Gary reckons it was a great turn.
SANDY: Yes, I heard.
BENTLEY: You hear that, Sandy? Gary reckons Davo enjoyed himself.
SANDY: Yes, I heard.
BENTLEY: You hear that, Sandy?
SANDY: Gary reckons we’ve got a great stereo set.
BENTLEY: Yes, I heard. (p. 30)
The exchange finally becomes absurdly mixed up, as Sandy deliberately
breaks the ritual pattern of question and response. This is a typical
example of the way Buzo builds purely imaginative patterns out of
speech, comically accentuating mannerisms in order to create witty
theatrical images of his characters’ obsessions.
Many of the repetitive exchanges in the play present language as an
empty social ritual. There are several exchanges (for example, pp. 53-6
and pp. 69-71) in which Bentley is ritually smothered in clichés by his
friends (Diane, Richard, Gary) in what amounts to a mocking chorus.
Buzo is particularly fond of revealing the emptiness of clichés by
building them into absurd patterns of mixed metaphors (‘Pull your socks
up and have a bash’; ‘Chin up and toe the line, you’ll soon be back on
your feet’), or by creating ludicrous visual images out of them.
Individual characters are identified by the meaningless jargon of the
circles they move in, of their occupations, or of the books and
magazines they read. Bentley constantly speaks of his personal life and
relationships in cant or jargon phrases absorbed from his job as a
Grade Three bureaucrat in the public service, from the world of
advertising, and in the later stages of the play, from glossy magazines
promising instant success and instant problem-solving in personal
relations. Bureaucratic double-talk provides him with the ridiculous
evasiveness of his answer to a simple question about whether he likes
his job:
BENTLEY: I can’t supply you with an unqualified categorical ‘yes’ or
‘no’ answer to that particular question. However, I should like to make
it abundantly clear that I consider the position eminently suitable on
a number of counts, but equally unsuitable on a number of other counts.
(p. 48)
Psychoanalytic jargon, and the sentimental clichés marketed by popular
women’s magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal, provide a pathetically
inadequate language to explain or cope with the facts of his personal
demoralisation, sustaining him in the illusion that he is ‘adopting a
meaningful stance’ (p. 94) or ‘establishing a point of reference’ (p.
95), or ‘undergoing some reorientation of the underlying factors
governing my basic attitudes to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness’ (p. 80).
At other points in the play (especially in its earlier scenes) Buzo
inserts longish monologues in which Bentley and Sandy reveal something
of the repressed inner world, of real needs and desires, which their
commitment to stylish social surface has gradually choked and thwarted.
Bentley’s monologue at the end of the play’s opening scene (pp. 31-2)
contains a typical mixture of delusions about his predicament and
genuine solicitation for his wife. Another, at the beginning of the
play’s third scene, reveals a genuine feeling for nature and for values
other than the superficial, which becomes progressively lost in the
course of the play.
The success of a play like Rooted depends to a great extent on the
effectiveness of its vigorous theatricalism—its unusual structure and
disposition of scenes, its inventive use of farcical situations and
gags, its visual excitements, and its witty and varied creation of
unusual patterns of speech—in providing an immediately humorous and
thought-provoking vision of a recognisable world. The world of the play
is immediately recognisable as the society, characterised by increasing
affluence and consumerism, into which younger Australians grew up in
the 1960s. Buzo offers a delightfully comic image of that world; but it
is also a satirist’s image, conveying a sharp comment on the
superficiality of the values on which it is based. Bentley, the play’s
sad clown, is its central symbol: the innocent, vociferous defender of
its values, and its most complete victim.
1. Note in The Australian Performing Group programme of The Front Room Boys at the 1970 Festival of Perth.
2. All page references are to Three Plays: Norm and Ahmed, Rooted, The Roy Murphy Show, Sydney, 1977.