Macquarie
Macquarie, by Alex Buzo; Parramatta Riverside Theatres, July 17-31, 2010.
IT MUST have seemed like a good idea at the time. On the face of it a production of Alex Buzo’s 1972 Gold Medal-winning play would appear to be tailor-made to celebrate the bicentenary of the visionary governorship of Lachlan Macquarie. Further investigation reveals, however, that the medal was awarded by the Australian Literature Society, (my italics) while it was the Australian Writers Guild that recognized the year’s best stage play and best script in giving its award for the year to David Williamson and The Removalists. This tells you something about Buzo’s Macquarie that cannot be disguised by any amount of imagination, skill and sheer hard work by the play’s director, Wayne Harrison.
There has been lively debate recently about whether a play is literature (viz the scandal of the non-hand out of a NSW Premier’s award for best play), and it’s arguable. What Macquarie proves, however, is that literature is not a play. Slabs of text apparently sourced from contemporary letters and journals do not make dialogue, and when dialogue is fashioned from such sources, it may be historically accurate but it’s not necessarily good theatre. That’s why drama and dramatic license were invented.
After a promising first ten minutes when the perky character of the Earl of Bathurst-cum-club DJ (Alan Dukes) is still a novelty, the inherent difficulties (for the actors) of the inventive staging and the pedestrian script become vocally and physically apparent. At this point Macquarie slowly sinks into somnolence of the kind you expect from the dreariest and most worthy of theatre-in-education shows. It’s so earnest it makes your teeth ache.
The rest of the cast – Kaeng Chan, Jack Campbell, Megan Drury, Graham Harvey, Chantelle Jamieson, Craig Meneaud, TJ Power, Russell Smith and David Whitney –copes, or not, with the virtually plotless script and roles that are rarely flesh and blood and mostly one-dimensional. The Macquarie story is a marvelous one and there’s a marvelous play still to be written about him: this is not it. Right now he might be spinning in his grave (pictured here) on the island of Mull in the Hebrides.
