THE LEGEND OF KING O'MALLEY
THE LEGEND OF KING O’MALLEY, Don’t Look Away with AAI and Seymour Centre at the Reginald Theatre, 27 November-13 December 2014. Photography by Afshar Hodar: James Cook and ensemble.
This production arrives in Sydney from Melbourne’s Don’t Look Away company heavily laden with history and the (alleged) memories of those who saw its fabled first production in 1970. That’s when anyone who was about to become someone in Australian theatre was in it; we’re talking Robyn Nevin, Kate FitzPatrick, Gillian Jones, William Yang, John Paramor… It was directed by John Bell at NIDA and - he has said - set him on his life’s course – no pressure then.
It’s a play with music, by Bob Ellis and Michael Boddy, and in the 1974 Angus & Robertson edition of the script they said it’s “a bit of a grab-bag. This is not a musical…it is a play with music - use as few or as many of the songs as you like; and put in your own favourites as you wish.” Director Phil Rouse and his company have done just that and its powered from behind an upright piano by Tom Pitts.
It would be difficult to over-exaggerate the vividly improbable life of American-born Australian pioneer politician King O’Malley (James Cook) so to treat it like a travelling tent show is to give the man the carnival he deserves (set and costumes Daniel Harvey and Zoe Rouse, lighting: Sian James-Holland). O’Malley’s early career in the US took him around the boondocks as a charismatic Hallelujah-and-pass-the-silver-dollar preacher. As the show begins members of the audience are drawn into this holy cycle of giving - with somewhat surprising results.
Preaching and surviving life’s vicissitudes take up much of the first half along with the dubious presence of Mr Angel (Alex Duncan). He is anything but and not only leads O’Malley into temptation but also delivers him to evil - well, to being shipwrecked off Rockhampton, which in 1888 was pretty much the same thing.
The remainder of the play is a wild and crazy ride from Rockie to what would finally become Canberra, federal ministerial posts in several governments and 17 years representing Tasmania in parliament. If it were not (mainly) true, it would require an inflamed imagination to dream up this life. And in the early 1970s, with Australia unwittingly about to break out of its long Menzies-sleep, it took this show and its authors and performers to inflame the imaginations of a generation of theatre-goers and theatre-makers.
In this rough and ready, high enthusiasm, low subtlety production, the amazingness of King O’Malley is writ large. How much of it was hucksterism, how much was opportunism and how much was sheer bloody-minded vision and inspiration is now hard to say as he invented so much and lied about so much else. Unlike some current politicians, however, and one TAbbott in particular, when he crossed his fingers and told a series of whoppers, it was for the greater good of the people and the new country.
It’s fascinating that this revisit of a seminal work should occur in Sydney at the same time as Rupert – by David Williamson with director Lee Lewis and made in much the same rambunctious and boldly colourful style. (See review here.) The two pieces make it clear how much of an Australian way this unabashed and unapologetic playmaking actually is and how it has filtered down through the years and following generations. And nowadays, of course, selling your soul to the devil is just about a national pastime (again, see Rupert and any day in the Parliament Houses of the nation).
Cook and Duncan lead the ensemble from the front and the energy generated by the company could power the Seymour Centre complex for a month. But it’s not that which makes it enlightening: for so many, history is something that happened last year - for those with long memories - and the determined forgetting of all that went before makes for a very shallow pond of experience. That The Legend of King O’Malley also happens to be hugely entertaining as well as instructive is a bonus that should be grabbed with both hands and savoured.
