Jon Brazier in Cloud Nine
Theatre
Sophia of Moscow (near Toowoomba)
by Paul Little
GOLDIE, by Peter Hawes, directed by Colin McColl, Maidment Theatre, Auckland (to May 22); CLOUD NINE, by Caryl Churchill, directed by Edwin Wright, Silo Theatre, Auckland.
Quite possibly the best reason to see the Auckland Theatre Company’s revival of Peter Hawes’s 1987 play about Charles F Goldie is for the performance of George Henare. As Parapa Te Tuhi, he reveals an eerie ability to make everyone else on stage invisible as he runs philosophical rings around the obtuse Goldie with his epistemologically unnerving Maori koans.
On opening night, he alone of the main players managed a consistent performance. Michael Hurst in the title role seemed much more comfortable in some scenes than others. But his transformation – from optimistic, top-of-the-class returning expatriate at the start of the play to deranged, lead-poisoned has-been two and a half hours later – was remarkable.
Sophia Hawthorne, for some reason, was trying out an accent that suggested mixed Russian-Home Counties-Australian ancestry, and the beguiling Cherie James, who shone in the first half, was left with little more to do than conduct a one-woman gurning contest in the second.
The Goldie of this play is not intended to be the Goldie of history, both our most conservative and our most controversial artist. Hawes offers up a mixture of fact, speculation and pure invention. The first half is focused on the painting of “The Arrival of the Maori in New Zealand”, signed by Goldie and his mentor Louis J Steele, though only the former works on it in the play. We know that this is invention – the artist hasn’t existed who would share credit for a painting without a gun at his head.
Thanks in part to his dialogues with Te Tuhi, this Goldie comes to believe that he understands Maori – the “dying race” he saw it as his mission to chronicle before it was too late. (Although he painted a surprisingly small number of that race, over and over again.)
Goldie begins to go mad when he is accused of using sensitised canvases and, effectively, tracing photographs to create his work. His downfall is complete when, after congratulating himself on this affinity with Maori, he discovers that his long-time Maori housekeeper has been married for 20 years.
We see him last endlessly scrawling his signature on scraps of paper, an act described by his modernist friend Harry Morrison as the greatest modern painting. That this is said of a work done by a madman, while visually it looks like the work of Colin McMahon, suggests an ambivalence on Hawes’s part about aspects of art.
What is not ambivalent is that the vanishing breed was artists like Goldie: painting to the death what he thought was a dying subject in a dead-end style using white-leaded canvases that helped to kill him.
In a play that makes play with ideas about art and reality, one of the more stimulating paradoxes occurred offstage. Sitting in the back row on opening night was Goldie forger Karl Sim (aka Charles F Goldie). At least, I think it was him. If not, it was a very good likeness.
Conservatism and reaction are also served up in Cloud Nine, which is becoming to sexual politics what Glide Time is to the public service: a reliable crowd-pleaser that, as the years go by, seems to demonstrate that, despite apparent revolutions in both sex and bureaucracy since they were written, not a lot has changed. The first half of the play is set in British Imperial Africa. In the second half, many of the same characters are reassembled 100 years later in Thatcher’s London, although they are only some 25 years older.
Silo Theatre’s Comedy Festival production is for the most part well-performed and briskly directed. The execution of the rapid-fire dialogue of the first half teeters on the brink of masterful, though the cast were visibly tiring before the end.
There’s stellar stuff from Jeremy Brennan in the cross-dressing role of twittering colonial wife Betty in act one and confused gay Londoner Edward in act two. At the other performance extreme, Russell Pickering fails to ignite in what should be the sure-fire parts of Harry the African explorer and Martin the bumptious Thatcherite husband.
Roles are assigned to reflect sexual and racial confusion. A white man plays a black servant, a man plays a woman, a woman plays a boy, a man plays a girl, a doll plays a child. One day, perhaps, women will portray boys by doing something other than constantly swivelling at the waist with their arms stiff at their sides, and men will play little girls by doing more than constantly jumping up and down with their arms waving in the air. This is not that day.
Among other “issues” touched on are the nature of maleness and femaleness, children and guns, goddess worship, single parenting and every kind of sexuality, possibly including some that exist only on paper.
The play ends by focusing on the up-tight Betty (beautifully played by Lucy Wigmore), who accepts herself more readily than the apparently more free-spirited others – a point conveyed movingly in the poignant final tableau.
