Buzo Company Double Bill
NORM & AHMED by Alex Buzo in a double bill with SHAFANA & AUNT SARRINAH by Alana Valentine; Alex Buzo Company at the Seymour Centre; August 8-29; phone: (02) 9351 7940
FORTY years ago when Alex Buzo’s uncompromising one act play was first staged it shocked audiences with its uneasy rhythms and structure, never mind the casual and all too authentic racism and general attitudes of Norm, its middle-aged “Aussie” protagonist. It still shocks in 2009 because the casual and all too authentic racism is still all too authentic; more than that however, it’s Norm’s forelock-tugging, class-based attitudes to his imagined superiors that seem almost more “un-Australian” than calling a spade a spade.
As directed by Aarne Neeme, the production takes the route of making Norm a quite powerfully malevolent if pathetic character from the outset (a performance of sustained energy and shading by Laurence Coy). He wheedles stilted chat and unwilling company from an understandably nervous young Pakistani student, Ahmed (beautifully realised characterisation from Craig Meneaud who should be a fixture on Sydney stages).
Fearfully and culturally compelled to be polite, nevertheless Ahmed is confident enough to humour the nasty old git – encountered while walking home late through a dodgy part of town. Although somewhat surreal, it’s also a set of circumstances familiar to most of us in some way or another: the too-pleasant nutter who slips into ultra-violence at the drop of an unintended insult. It’s a fortuitous if extra uneasy bit of timing for the play to be running while the “Indian student attacks” are still fresh in the minds of most, and the ambivalence of what happens during the roller-coaster ride to nowhere mirrors the uncertainty and weirdness of the Melbourne events.
Because Norm is brutish from the outset, the denouement is not as shocking as it might have been if, for instance, he had been more of a Sandy Stone – innocently oblivious to his own shortcomings and worldview. Nevertheless, the play remains powerful and compelling no matter what and it’s now a New South Wales HSC Drama text, which suggests we’ve come some way since 1968 when it was banned all over the place, riotous behaviour occurred and arrests were made!
Quite where we’ve come to, however, is then obliquely addressed by its new companion piece, commissioned by Emma Buzo: Alana Valentine’s Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah.
With Camilla Ah Kin as Aunt Sarrinah and Sheridan Harbridge as her niece, it’s an absorbing and confronting story about two generations of Muslim women in Australia today. Sarrinah was born in Afghanistan and back in Kabul was a highly placed civil engineer; an educated, independent woman who was forced to flee by pulverising wars and the rise of the Taliban. Now in Australia, she has been compelled to start all over again, her qualifications and experience are not recognised and neither, by the by, are the nightmares and horrors of her past.
In contrast, Shafana is a top science student at Australia’s oldest and most prestigious university. Her bright future is soaring ahead of her with no outward or likely hiccups in sight. She has all the emotional confidence and complacency of someone who has never seen death, torture and bombs; and never suffered a day’s loss, pain or grief in her blithe young life.
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In the non-linear structure of the play (Valentine’s nod to Buzo, perhaps) September 11 changes everything for Shafana. It’s a profoundly logical absurdity that she is unable to empathise or connect with her beloved aunt’s personal views and experience, but is instantly affected by the TV intimacy of the attacks on New York and Washington DC. When she nervously tells her aunt she is “thinking” of adopting the hijab, Sarinnah’s instant retort is that “hijab” is not an Afghani word; she thereafter refers to it as a scarf.
On one level, the small, simple ways of ordinary life in what happens between Shafana and Sarinnah are funny, painful and immediately recognisable to anyone who has ever had a beloved older woman relative in their life – or a beloved younger woman relative. But there is another layer to Valentine’s very accomplished play and it’s about laying open to us – non-Muslim and/or non-religious Australians – the dichotomy and contradictions in two very different relationships to religion and God.
Sarinnah is a Muslim woman, born and bred, but her religion is a part of her life and thinking, her work, her family and her own history are other parts of her too; for the newly-awakened Shafana, however, her religion defines her utterly – and outwardly. It is the most important thing in her life and she has the sweetly manic glowing gaze of Julie Andrews or Audrey Hepburn when they first get God and embrace the outward trappings of – ironically – the veil.
Sheridan Harbridge makes a radiantly obstinate and charming Shafana while Camilla Ah Kin is outstanding as Aunt Sarinnah, a woman whose life and serenity have been threatened once too often to take it lying down, no matter what the consequences.
They might have been written four decades apart, but Norm & Ahmed and Shafana & Aunt Sarinnah are like beautifully wrought bookends to a part of Australia’s recent history and they are both alarmingly topical and their reception will be constantly evolving. As a double bill each serves the other while remaining independent and utterly different. Recommended.
