Tuesday March 19, 2024
THE EVENTS
Review

THE EVENTS

May 23 2016

THE EVENTS, Upstairs Belvoir, co-produced by Belvoir with Malthouse Melbourne and State Theatre Company of SA, to 12 June 2016. Photography by Shane Reid, above: Catherine McClements; right: McClements and Johnny Carr.

The Events – by Scottish playwright David Greig – first opened at the Edinburgh Festival in 2013 to acclaim. It has since been staged by an American company in New York with similar success and now, in a tri-state co-production, has been a big hit at this year’s Sydney Festival before moving on to Adelaide and – after this season at Belvoir – will play in Melbourne at the Malthouse.

So, what is so special about this 75-minute play-with-choir? First, it’s that most beguiling of entertainments – tragedy with music – and few can resist the combination of horror and beauty, sadness and the uplift of massed human voices. Second, it’s about that most repellent yet fascinating of acts: deliberate massacre of fellow human beings by an individual in what passes these days for peacetime.

Greig’s start point was the Norwegian ultra-rightist wing-nut who perpetrated mass murder – 77 at a Labor youth summer camp – and terrorism in 2011. Greig’s question is the one virtually everyone asked of that event: why? And in The Events he gives the question and search for answers to Claire (Catherine McClements) a hearty, smiling, well-meaning and clumsy Anglican vicar.

The show opens with members of the choir trickling in, along with the audience, chatting among themselves as they wait for Claire and practice. She finally clumps in, late – you get the feeling she’s often late and always apologetic – and they begin. It’s lovely – the earnest, occasionally quavering, intensely heartfelt sound of amateur voices gathered to make music. 

Also watching and listening and – slowly – approaching is The Boy and, as performed by Johnny Carr, it’s not projection or foreknowledge that tells us he reeks of menace, yet Claire goes all out to encourage him to come in, join in, be part of it. Her boofy chumminess doesn’t allow her to see the invitation is the last thing he wants.

Why did this disaffected young man choose a community choir as the target for his rage? What did he think he meant by “cultural purity”? Why does no one have even the glimmer of an answer? In the aftermath of the deadly rampage (unseen, by the way) Claire becomes obsessed with why she survived when others did not and she interrogates herself and anyone else who stands still long enough to be skewered by her despair – her therapist, members of the local community, her yurt-building lesbian partner (a moment of levity in this image), a grief counsellor, the Boy’s father (all played, sometimes confusingly, by Johnny Carr). 

Yet all is in vain because of course, The Boy is all the cliches we know about such people and none of them are useful except in hindsight. And hindsight is of no use to anyone. Whether it’s Anders Breivik, Martin Bryant, Timothy McVeigh or whomever, if there’s a lesson in their stories it is that we learn nothing and see nothing until it’s too late.

The Events is in no way gory or outwardly confronting – there is no blood, no physical violence – which leaves everything to the imagination. While Claire explores her bewilderment it is almost dreamlike as the choir (different group each performance) punctuates the existential puzzle with beautiful music. 

THE EVENTS

Its lasting effect – for me anyway – was to make me think. The title, for instance is straight out of the calculated jargon of bureaucracy. It immediately brings to mind other massacres and the grossly euphemistic Senate Select CommitteeReport on A Certain Maritime Incident” – a bland description of the sinking of the SIEV X and drowning of 353 asylum-seekers. It became the book of the same title by Tony Kevin and a theatre production devised by version 1.0 (performers and director Paul Dwyer). 

Hannie Rayson fictionally dramatised that same event in 2005’s (MTC) production of Two Brothers. In it she quite reasonably (and fictionally) suggested the Howard government of the day was guilty of mass murder and re-election dog-whistling (Just like Margaret Thatcher with her finger on the missile launch button that killed 800 young sailors aboard the Argentinian battleship Belgrano).

Melbourne’s rightwing commentariat didn’t consider the Falklands parallel, they just went nuts at Rayson. Among many crimes allegedly committed by the playwright was one described by one Tom Hyland (opinion in The Age) as “preaching to the converted” – which is piquant when we look at the Rev. Claire’s efforts.

In his journal article CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident): introduction, my esteemed chum and colleague John McCallum dismisses this oft-raised criticism for all time with, “Some critics and commentators complained that these works were ‘preaching to the converted’, ignoring the fact that, outside evangelism, this is largely what preaching is for.” It is sort of funny, but in the circumstances: not.

Which brings us back to The Events and final questions: whatever happened to Australian theatre that its current crop of brilliants is so obsessed with adapting and re-creating ancient classics from elsewhere? Why has it been 20 years since the Port Arthur massacre and the only major attempt to make sense of Martin Bryant’s extraordinary story is the book Born or Bred? Martin Bryant: The Making of a Mass Murderer, by Robert Wainwright and Paola Totaro?

The Events is, you’ve probably worked out, a thought-provoking 75 minutes and although it asks questions, it provides few if any answers – at least, not to the Breivik conundrum. But surely, if theatre is of any importance (and I say it is of fundamental importance to us all) then it’s to make us question, not provide pat answers. 

Directed by Clare Watson on an authentically simple and baldly lit church hall set (Geoff Cobham) with pianist and musical director Luke Byrne at an on-stage piano, The Events does that. Recommended.

 

 

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