A MAN WITH FIVE CHILDREN
A MAN WITH FIVE CHILDREN, Darlinghurst Theatre Company at the Eternity Playhouse, 4-26 June 2016. Photography by Helen White: above, l-r - Chenoa Deemal, Jody Kennedy, Anthony Taufa, Charlotte Hazard, Taylor Wiese and Ildiko Susany. Right: Taylor Wiese and Chenoa Deemal.
This is the last of the major “Nick Enright plays” to be staged at the Eternity through DarloTC after Daylight Saving (2014) and Good Works (2015), and is possibly the most ambitious, both as a play and a production.
First conceived with students at WAAPA in 1998 and worked on subsequently into the professional play staged by Sydney Theatre Company in 2002, A Man With Five Children was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Play Award in 2003. Enright took as his inspiration the UK television phenomenon, Michael Apted’s “Up” series. That began in 1964 with a group of seven-year-olds piping up about their expectations of life and, although not originally intended, went on to revisit them at seven year intervals until the final, 56 Up.
In the play, as in the series, the filmmaker Gerry (Jeremy Waters) begins with a twist on the saying, "Give me the child until he is seven and I'll give you the man.” What Apted/Enright/Gerry do, however, is to take the child’s view of her- or himself and then, through the follow-ups, see what happened – some of it predictable, mostly not. That’s life, it seems to say.
As with 7 Up, the play offers a neat range of subjects – not so much stereotypes as signifiers: Roger, an “Asian” boy, actually Australian-born of Malaysian/Filipina parents (Jemwel Danao); an Aboriginal girl, Jessie (Chenoa Deemal); a snotty white honky, Susannah (Charlotte Hazzard); a shy working class girl, Zoe (Jody Kennedy) and an angry white boy – who spits “boong” and “slope” at Zoe and Roger – Cam (Taylor Wiese).
In both instances, the first meeting is a visit to the zoo when the kids are full of boundless optimism and fun and barely notice the man with the camera. As time goes by (quickly and to great effect via projected film clips of each child – Tim Hope, AV design, on a set by Georgia Hopkins, lighting Christopher Page) the inevitable awareness kicks in and manipulation, on both sides of the camera, with it.
“I don’t create your lives, I follow them,” Gerry protests at one point. Watching now, in the age of reality TV, this is naive to the point of absurdity, but highlights the societal changes since 1964/1972 (Enright’s start point). The ideas and assumptions from back then seem innocent in the extreme, and not just from the point of view of the kids. At a time when pedophilia and its uncovering is a daily public occurrence, there is something “off” in the idea of a man and a camera following a mob of children in their vulnerable growing up years. Could it happen now? Would parents permit it? Probably not.
What transpires, over the years, in A Man With Five Children, are the events – small and large – of everyday life. Love, loss, babies, no babies, success, failure, dreams and nightmares. Ambitions and expectations are recalibrated or forgotten (“I don’t remember saying that. Did I really?”) in ways we can all recognise and share.
Joining the five, as they become adults, are their variously significant others (Anthony Taufa, Ildiko Susany and Aaron Tsindos) who – with the kids/adults – give uniformly beautiful, nuanced, heartfelt and intelligent performances. Whether writ large on-screen or on stage, this group of actors, directed in a complex visual, emotional and textual tapestry by Anthony Skuse, are immensely watchable and engrossing.
That this remains so across their lives to 35, in two hours plus interval, is almost entirely due to the professionalism and commitment of these actors in the face of the central character of Gerry the filmmaker. In this opening night performance at least (8 June) he was a charmless, blustering presence. Every utterance was delivered in a blaring monotone that lacked apparent conviction, comprehension or credibility. This human foghorn wasn’t helped by a soundscape that started out aurally bombastic and insanely repetitive and didn’t improve.
All credit to Chenoa Deemal, Jody Kennedy, Anthony Taufa, Charlotte Hazzard, Taylor Wiese, Ildiko Susany and Aaron Tsindos for maintaining the integrity of the play and their roles in it – extraordinary effort. A Man With Five Children is by turns, very funny and also shockingly sad, entertaining and thought-provoking. Again, the tragedy of Nick Enright’s premature death is underlined: he would have given us so much more. Meanwhile, if someone can get Jeremy Waters to put a sock in it and be Gerry, rather than ACT, it will be even better than it already is.
