RUPERT
RUPERT, Theatre Royal, 29 November-21 December 2014. Photography by James Morgan: Guy Edmonds, James Cromwell and Danielle Cormack; right: Jane Turner does Thatcher.
Every now and then, said Paul Keating famously, you have to flick the switch to vaudeville. And that’s what director Lee Lewis has done with David Williamson’s story of the most powerful living Australian-born-American-for-convenience mogul: Keith Rupert Murdoch.
It works well because the overall effect is so…Rupertian! It’s all headlines, energy, short sharp shocks and that underlying lugubriousness and sentimentality that characterises his greatest/worst achievements. In other words, this is tabloid theatre and it suits the subject and the script startlingly well.
The playwright is not known for right-wing sentiments but in this instance, he’s wisely left all wings at home and pretty much tells the story straight and to the point. It helps that the story is a good one and needs little extra imagination or added embellishment. Indeed, the opposite might be the case: write the life of Murdoch as fiction and the response could well be “pshaw! That could never happen.”
And so, ladies and gentlemen, roll up, sit back, relax and marvel at how he tap dances, how he twinkles, how he charms and cajoles and – when that doesn’t work – how he just plain intimidates. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the closest you’ll get to knowing this peculiar man - in his lifetime at least.
The Murdoch story is told “my way” - says the man (James Cromwell, whose tall, obsidian boniness gives an impression rather than a likeness). He is the amused narrator and observer of his own life as Guy Edmonds plays out the adventures he relates, from vexed youth to omnipotent tycoon. They know each other, these two, and there is sly and unlikely humour in their interplay.
It seems, in this portrait, that the pump primer for Rupert’s ceaseless drive is something said to him by his mother, Elisabeth, long ago as he was lawlessly clawing his way up from one small, inherited and money-losing newspaper in Adelaide to world domination.
“Is it possible you might do something, sometime that would make me proud?” she asks, in a voice so calmly forbearing it is far worse than any snap or slap could have been. Jane Turner’s (Dame) Elisabeth is one of the least pantomime characters in the 60-some shared by the hardworking cast and is effective for that. Later she inhabits the blue suits and helmet hair of Margaret Thatcher with goofy venom.
Later in the piece, by which time Rupert has bought up most of the meaningful media outlets in Australia, the UK and the US, his wife Anna (very plausible Danielle Cormack) repeats the question: “Is it possible you might do something, sometime that would make me proud?” And the writing is on the wall, both for their marriage - over after 31 years when he met the Shanghai minx Wendi Deng (HaiHa Le) - and for what might pass as his inner life.
Does he have one? It’s hard to say and not just because this is an extended cabaret rather than conventional hagiography or bio-pic. This is a man who supports and promotes according to what will be good for business – his business. He has no ideology, no perceptible belief system (other than “make more money, acquire more power”) and no moral compass in the conventional sense. He’s not the easiest man to characterise without an element of cartoon or caricature because in everyday terms, he’s simply unbelievable!
With that in mind, it’s suddenly apparent that the Lewis/Williamson approach to their subject is absolutely spot-on. It’s also very entertaining and, played on a simple, 40pt headline-style set (set, costumes and AV design by Stephen Curtis, lighting: Niklas Pajanti) wears its 2.5 hours including interval lightly. Choreographer Andrew Hallsworth also contributes to the sense of cabaret that in the moment makes for a degree of surface fun that disguises, until later, what lies beneath.
If you’ve been asleep, under a rock or are simply not interested in what’s going on in the world around you and have been that way for the past four decades, your response to Rupert might be goggle-eyed amazement; otherwise, there’s every chance you’ll learn a bit, be reminded of even more and come away wondering whether Rupert bleeds an alien toxic substance if he nicks himself while shaving. Cos he sure as hell ain’t like the rest of us.
