Parker's play about Rob Muldoon is a mini-masterpiece.
Phil Grieve at Muldoon
Halfway through Dean Parker’s mini-masterpiece Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the late and largely unlamented ex-Prime Minister Rob Muldoon is visited by a National Party apparatchik to ask him to renew his membership. Muldoon refuses.
It’s a telling moment, indicative of the complexity of the man, and the layered account of his personal and political life that Parker – an acknowledged socialist – provides in this roller coaster of a play.
Directed (hectically, brilliantly) by David Lawrence, with Phil Grieve pulling out all the stops as Muldoon, Slouching is first and foremost a theatrical treat. Parker uses, to stunning and often hilarious effect, puppetry, song, Shakespearean quotes, a hoot of a poem by Sam Hunt, cranky choreography, a ragtag-and-bobtail collection of props, fiendishly fast costume changes, and a Greek chorus that dons so many different hats the audience is left reeling. If I have a criticism it’s that the youth of the chorus members (the average age couldn’t have been more than 25) didn’t always sit comfortably with the looming, middle-aged Muldoon. Nor were all the many characters they had, individually, to create successful. But what was lacking in finesse was more than made up for in commitment to the story.
Less, in drama, is supposed to be more, but in this play the audience is left wishing there could have been at least three further acts: Muldoon and the Mongrel Mob; Muldoon as star of The Rocky Horror Show; Muldoon conspiring with the Rugby Union. The man was larger than life. In harnessing that energy, Parker has stirred up a tsunami of possibilities. Why not a new Peter Jackson movie titled Springtime for Muldoon?
SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM, by Dean Parker, directed by David Lawrence, the Bacchanals, Bats Theatre, Wellington, August 31-September 10.