Homebody/Kabul
IF Tony Kushner had never written another word for the stage after Angels in America his place in American – and world – theatre would have been assured. As it is, Homebody/Kabul, his prescient (aka common sense) play from 2001 has finally reached Sydney thanks to independent producers Sam Hawker & Tangent Productions under the wing of B Sharp at Belvoir St.
As he did with the love-in-the-age-of-AIDS epic, Kushner makes the personal political and the political excruciatingly personal. This time the landscape is at once more intimate while encompassing the sweep of history and geography as they pertain to that region we know as Afghanistan and its neighbours.
The play is a curious shape opening with Gillian Jones as the Homebody – a nice, middle class London woman – engaging the audience in a one-sided and non-stop 45 minute one-person conversation. Not a monologue, by the way, it is definitely a conversation, it’s just that she’s the only one talking. Although she does it with such extraordinary spontanaeity and obsessive, dotty warmth that the night I was in, a woman in the front row began to reply to her questions, so convincing was Jones’s engagement with her listeners.
Homebody reads aloud from an out of date guide book to Kabul. She is fascinated by the city and its history and by words and concepts in their wider sense to a point way beyond eccentricity. She describes her state as “psycho panicky” and although you won’t find that in Wikipedia, it’s pretty much self explanatory. Homebody’s mind and ideas float and leap freely from association to association in a dizzying and compelling display of language. Homebody is possibly the best work Gillian Jones has done in a long time; which is not to say that she hasn’t done other good work, but rather, that this performance is sublime.
An abrupt change of pace and style is the consequence of Homebody’s departure from comfy London to Kabul where she apparently disappears. Her personal, inner quest is immediately followed by an outward but equally personal quest by her husband and daughter as they blunder into Taliban territory to find her in their metaphorical neo-colonial hobnail boots.
Tony Llewellyn Jones is strong as Milton Ceiling (Kushner has fun with “English” names) as he slowly slides from computer engineering certainty to bewilderment and a logical loosening of absolute conviction in the face of loopy experiments with Afghanistan’s most famous local product – not carpets. His entree into the world of opium is an expatriate English NGO staffer, Quango Twiselton (Simon Bossell) whose name tells you everything about the rather limp, dissolute yet well meaning chap he is.
As Milton’s daughter Priscilla, Lotte St Clair is a painful mixture of boldly independent and a lost lamb as she searches not only for her mother but for the nature and status of their relationship. In Kabul she quickly learns that independence and other western follies are not going to be tolerated. She falls in with – or is picked up by – Khwaja Aziz Mondanabosh, an opportunistic poet and would-be guide to Kabul, played by Nicholas Papademetriou in what is also one of the best performances he’s given in some while. And the same must be said of Odile Le Clezio whose portrait of an educated, middle class librarian whose life is in jeopardy at the hands of the Taliban and the mullahs because she is all those things, is also electric.
There are no weak links in the cast: George Kanaan, Keith Agius, Craig Meneaud and James Evans bring implacable hostility and righteousness to their roles as various Afghani clerics and gunmen. It’s as if Kushner’s script and Gillian Jones’ inspired playing of the first part of it are the twin rockets that launch the rest of the play and the actors on an unstoppable upward trajectory.
The play also abounds in ideas and strands that loosely weave and finally tie up as fully fledged concepts. Milton’s computers and the librarian’s Dewey decimal system are as impenetrable to the uninitiated as Khwaja’s misplaced faith in Esperanto – in which he writes his poetry. For the mullah who arrests him, Esperanto is not only impenetrable but subversive – as are the burqas forced upon Priscilla and embraced by the librarian. Frank Sinatra’s 13th album for Capitol Records is as bound up in the action as is the Homebody’s early musing on the Greco-Bactrian confusion (ancient China in case you’re wondering).
Christopher Hurrell deftly directs the company of ten in the tiny, tricky Downstairs space and has drawn memorable performances from all. Set, costumes, lighting and sound/composition by Tom Bannerman, Amanda McNamara, Grant Fraser and Rosie Chase respectively are also very fine.
Homebody/Kabul is a deceptive play. At first it seems broken-backed because of Homebody’s 45 minute-solo fireworks. On reflection, however, the character sets up and sets running all the story strands and ideas that the rest of the play and characters then takes up and expands upon. And it makes sense that she should be such an over-arching, if invisible, presence in the second half because without her, there is little sense in pursuing the ghost against such odds.
You may have heard that this is a long play: it is. But it’s also immensely rewarding, unexpectedly funny, provocative and moving.
