Saturday March 30, 2024
Trying
Review

Trying

May 14 2007

Trying, Ensemble Theatre, May 3-June 16; ph: 9929 0644 or www.ensemble.com.au

In 1967, when young Joanna McClelland Glass was hired as secretary to Judge Francis Biddle, her career as a novelist and playwright was unknowably in the future. In contrast, the eminent judge was ailing and failing, well aware that his future was coming to meet him, fast. They spent a year getting his papers, letters and other writing in order before he died at the age of 82.

Biddle was a patrician American whose pedigree was Republican but whose life experience led him to the Democrats. His career was illustrious - Attorney General under Franklin D Roosevelt and the US judicial representative at the Nuremburg war trials - and controversial. He expressed deep regret at his actions in 1941, post-Pearl Harbor, that led to the internment and ill treatment of many thousands of American citizens of Japanese origin.

McClelland Glass was not patrician and not American either, much to Biddle's initial consternation. She was from the prairies - Saskatoon, Saskatchewan - a Canadian (a US citizen since 1962) for whom Washington DC and the judge's illustrious reputation were equally enthralling.

Some 30-plus years on, McClelland Glass turned that seminal year in her life into this play. Wisely, she had already honed her craft to a fine edge: it was her seventh to be produced in North America. The result is a story that could so easily have been sentimental, didactic or merely documentary but which is actually deftly and lightly written, charming, moving and very funny; packing much more into its two acts than a merely hokey tale of a feisty 25-year-old and a cranky 81-year-old.

Although the script is a gift, so too are the performances in this good-looking production, directed with economy and sensitivity by Sandra Bates.

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Michael Craig, a sprightly and debonair 78 in real life, is a star of the old school. A bona fide matinee idol, his long career - first in Britain and, since the 1970s, in Australia - has been mostly spent looking impossibly handsome and being underestimated as an actor.

Trying

In Trying, Craig is superbly subtle as the grumpy old man. It's a beautifully judged physical performance: over the course of the evening Judge Biddle visibly deteriorates from elderly to frail to almost gone. And it is also a masterly character study as the judge, a pernickety grammarian and a man accustomed to subservience, gradually moves from vinegary self absorption to exasperated respect and affection. This in response to the young woman - named Sarah in the play (Catherine McGraffin) - who is polite but as ornery as he and not cowed by him and around whose little finger he is eventually wound.

As Sarah from Saskatchewan, newcomer Catherine McGraffin is Craig's equal and foil. Sarah has read biographies of the judge before taking up her post and this charms him as much as her split infinitives do not. McGraffin does innocent, feisty and diffident with conviction, her comic timing matches that of the veteran deliverer of one-liners and her character's journey is also clearly defined and believable.

The action takes place in the judge's office: a converted hayloft over a barn behind his Georgetown mansion. The set, by Nicholas Dare, lighting by Peter Neufeld, is one of the best-looking and most workable to fill the Ensemble's space in a long time. Roof trusses define and identify the space which is decorated in a way that Ralph Lauren borrowed for his distressed gentlefolk, neo-ancestral homewares range.

Trying, like Michael Healey's The Drawer Boy, programmed by the Ensemble last year, is another terrific play from a country whose dramatic wares we otherwise know almost nothing of. It's obviously a rich lode that Sandra Bates has discovered: don't put down your pick any time soon, ma'am.

 

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