Ringing Heaven

John Romeril


After the rocky horror comes the floating world.

He who gave us Hair but boasts minimal thatch (the kind of paradox the theatre trades in), Jim Sharman, gave the first Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture at Belvoir Street in July last year. Jim, being Jim and a lighthouse of a man, cast a shining beacon across a sea of faces and set a mean benchmark. I'll be hard pressed to get near it.

Predictably, the dedication to craft that you see in his shows comes through in what he thinks and writes. I especially love a piece he once did about getting Hair on in Tokyo in the '70s. A deep fascination with Japan is something we share but in last year's paper, entitled In the Realm of the Imagination with wit and elegance, whilst he batted around a brace of issues, he was at pains to stress, as his title suggests, that the theatre is a place where the role of the imagination is decisive.

I concur utterly with that - but I want to refine it a little - and I want to fire a shot across our bows by suggesting this thing we in the theatre prize, the imagination, can be dangerous when applied to realms of existence that don't warrant its intrusion. In a way the imagination is the opposite of knowledge - too much of it can become a very pernicious social force.

Jim last year, me today, have both been asked for our thoughts on Australian theatre and culture in general and to deliver them in a manner that is both honest and provocative. Unlike Jim, I face an added stricture - my brief is to be brief. Where he played Wordsworth, I come as Basho.

Theoretically I should be up to the task. I am used to meeting deadlines, to bringing shows in on budget and I can, generally speaking, cut a piece to a desired length. These are issues of craft. Alas, however, big (honest and provocative) ideas don't always enjoy being confined to the haiku form.

Time of course is absolutely fundamental to our art. That's one of the major things we do on the boards - we sculpt time. We sculpt time and we carve space. And if I had to do a Julius Sumner Miller on the subject of the theatre I would say it is S (space) over T (time) divided by P (people). What's plainly missing in this equation is AF (the attention factor), a critical but slippery variable.

If we attend to what we do, if we give to our handling of space and time sufficient care and craft, enough cunning, enough imagination, an audience too, will attend what we do. But there is no guarantee of this, and history abounds with cases where good work, technically accomplished, beautifully paced, spectacular to behold and so on, plays to disappointing and disappointed audiences. Equally, at other times, slip-shod, totally forgettable productions run off with the kudos, and the cash. And we insiders fall back aghast - depressed, frustrated, out of sorts with the artform - the theatre has (yet again) proved a far more complex beast than we'd presumed.

Now it's obvious that this mathematics is something the theatre shares with life in general - both can crudely but effectively enough be defined as the attention or consciousness we apply to how people move through space over time. But this overlap, this congruence, can, if we're not careful, give rise to inadequate explanations of both art and life.

Take a simple example, known to us all, the term show business. I play economic rationalist with the best of them (and I hope to today) because the moment the theatre, in a society like ours, displays no concern for dollars it starts to make no sense. In fact I don't think there is a theatre anywhere in the world today that can operate insulated from the cash economy. Theatre costs money and someone pays. It either generates its own revenue, is publicly or privately subsidised, or it survives on a mix of the two. Gambler Paul, in many countries for instance, is coerced into bankrolling theatrical Peta. The village uses the harvest surplus to fund the festival etc. The ins and outs of all this I don't need to canvass here. Doubtless this conference will plummet into the usual funding whinge without me pushing it in that direction.

But something profound, something that should concern us, happens when we couple the word show with the word business. A gentle, often imperceptible, often long term slide towards thinking of the theatre as a business like any other gets underway, and a weakening of our grasp over what's special and unique about the artform is a consequence. It's just a job, its just a product like any other, becomes the prevailing mentality leading us towards utter obsolescence. We who used to demand the extraordinary of ourselves, and audiences who expected nothing less, begin to make do with lesser fare. A notion of normalcy insinuates itself into our theatre-making when only a firm and unwavering commitment to the opposite will save our profession's skin. If you come to the theatre expecting the normal - if you want to be in and of the theatre because it's a normal job - I have something very simple to say to you: Fuck off. Such expectations are part of the problem, not the solution.

The theatrically enervating century-old triumph of realism is an obvious aesthetic result we're still trying to shrug off. A drab plain brown utterly ordinary theatre for common ordinary folk managed by time-serving do-nothings. What a sell-out, what an insult to our dwindling audiences and our theatrical forebears. Has the theatre's roots in ritual and religiosity come to this? Be it classic or modern, the theatre's true allies are delirium, danger, the unpredictable, the non-routine, and the fantastically skilled. Not what we can do ourselves or see at home - but what we can't! At all times the theatre has had to be lively - to mistakenly assume being 'life-like' will wring the price of a ticket from a patron is the quickest way to poverty I know. As a great writer once said, I don't write about the real world, there's one of those already.

This lack of definitional rigour works in the reverse way. When people raid the theatre and use it as a metaphor for life, again, they blur the distinction between the two by pretending they are not what they are, which in effect is two different planets. Thus we get a term like the theatre of war. Colourful journalese, sure, meaning no more perhaps than that a war is occurring in this or that zone. But what if a sleight of mind is also occurring? What if the horror, the gore, the bestiality, the utterly gormless nature of officially sanctioned murder and mayhem is being made to look like what it absolutely is not - a play. The theatre's bullets are rubber - on the battlefield they're real. In life we live and die - in the theatre we die but take a bow.

Take too the way we describe a situation when someone breaks down before us, cuts loose with some of the inner turmoil they're feeling, allows themselves to express an overheated or emotional state. They've lost the plot, right, they're lounging on a turn, they're making a spectacle of themselves. Thus we, who would prefer our equanimity to remain undisturbed, sound a linguistic retreat from the actual nature - and causes - of the raw primal angst we're confronted with. We set a screening effect in train (much like the news on television does). We distance ourselves from this real-life angst, we weaken and drain it of its power, and its claim on us, by winding a gauze of fiction around an often hurt and bleeding body of fact.

Real people, who should have for all of us a deep and abiding fascination, sometimes bordering on terror, who in a truly moral world would compel our sympathy and concern, start to become ciphers. The rags of the beggar we perceive as a costume, the starvation as an act. When the theatre's powerful, often austerely beautiful, capacity for abstraction is employed to rob life of its phenomenal and awesome three-dimensionality, a kind of immorality festers and spreads.

This, I submit, is how the imagination becomes a dangerous thing. What made Hitler a monster, and fascism a nightmare, is not too little but too much imagination. He imagined the German people really were a master race, and the Jews and Gypsies and poofters and Slavs really were an under-class. Wrong, and a thousand, a million, six million times a totally criminal falsehood. Nevertheless he won the right to impose that view across much of Europe. His sick theatricality was let loose on the world. And Stalin's likewise. Such people prefer their diagrams, and fail to apprehend the real thing. It takes a feat of the imagination to turn a person into a number, to turn flesh and blood into a statistic, an untouchable.

Yes Jim, and I say it with you, when we in the theatre debase and degrade the imagination, the quality and finally the quantity of our theatre-making suffers. In the field it is our greatest, sometimes our only tool, but not just artistically essential, it is socially legitimate - the free play of the imagination is just that - a play. But life itself is not a stage - and when we go back there after a show, as we must, we, as 3D human beings, have tasks, responsibilities and rights, infinitely greater outside the theatre than we have as players: or an audience within it.

Sure people can - and do - dream and fantasise at home, at work, at school, on the bus, in front of the telly. More often than not these fictions and flights of fantasy function as they do in the theatre to amuse us and fill the hours, enhance the quality of life. We are dialectically gifted beings who bounce between the real and the imagined, but when the latter takes over - alas for the individuals involved - madness and self-delusion ensues. But there are also times - and one such may be brewing here - when the unfettered imagination produces society-wide a mass psychology of monstrous proportions as it did in Nazi Germany. Then the appeal of certain convenient and plausible-sounding fictions, harnessed to our basest instincts, turn us into beasts, devouring human decency, rending and tearing the social fabric, stripping away whatever protection the thin mantle of civilisation our ancestors have handed on affords.

I think we are all worried about Australia, that somehow the centre will not hold. I pray (quite unusual for me really) that we're developed enough as a nation to crisis-manage the current situation, but I condemn utterly the opportunistic and Machiavellian behaviour of the Liberal party, and not just in these past seven hellish weeks, but for decades. It's as though, in opposition, the Feds did nothing to prepare themselves for the real-world challenges of office, simply doodled away at an ever less relevant cartoon vision of how the world functions. In power, with nothing for a social agenda but a transparent attempt to shore-up and multiply private wealth, at the cost of public squalor, they threaten to foist on the country a situation akin to the misery you find in Mayhew or Dickens.

Is it a revue sketch? Onward, back to the nineteenth century, with a first stop in the '50s, Costello playing Leave It to Beaver, Howard as Menzies minus the eye-brows, and somehow or other they'll reconstruct the old certainties. Those certainties are smashed, I thought everyone knew that, but apparently not. Apparently the longing for an imagined and unrecoverable world beats in more breasts than I figured. The truth is - and wishing won't make it otherwise - the world's moved on with a vengeance. The '50s isn't just fifty years out of date, they're receding at an accelerating rate. If I was an Australian manufacturer, or retailer, or forester, or farmer, or miner, or orchardist, I'd be quaking in my boots given the incompetence of this federal government. I'm a playwright, we're gentle folk and slow to anger; but I am very, very, very, very, very aghast. Am I alone in expecting Australian politicians - of any party - to have a sense of history, a sense of geography, a sense a above all of how yesterday became today? Have they no children? Have they no brains? Do they know what region they're living in? I believe in real politik, I cut my teeth on the collectives of the '60s and '70s. I'm at peace with the idea that Machiavellies will probably always be with us, but these guys play chess half a move ahead, in fact don't even seem to know where the board is.

Add to Bib and Bub, Alexander the Great, who thinks we need head prefect fresh from reading Gibbon and Macaulay, add Vanstone whose attack on brains is fast eroding any lead time we had in the intelligence department, and the recipe for disaster's complete. The nations that make headway in the immediate decades ahead will be democratic meritocracies. End of story. They will benefit, they will create wealth and stability, they will do so by encouraging and liberating the productive power of their people, not by turning the populace into uneducated, unskilled yahoos, and trying to stay in power on the never-to-be-trusted back of ignorance. Jonathan Swift come back - we need you!

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