Patrick Recti. Johnny Rush. Michael McCaffrey uni! Jim Porter in 77V\ The Choir.
rational sense long after the emotions have recovered. If the recent Nimrod production seems to suggest that somewhere between Canberra and Sydney Neil Armfield developed doubts about the play, Bryan Nason’s production emerges as a complete act of faith in both its form and content. The TN Company’s rendering is forceful and sensitively balanced, drawing super lative performances from a cohesive and dedicated cast and sustaining a rare emotional intensity throughout the evening. David Bell’s set, dominated by a whitewashed besserblock monolith and a towering rack of blood-red cassocks, upholds a compelling anti-naturalism not perhaps fully realised in the acting style, which must cater for a script dedicated to the realistic texture of youthful banter. The first few scenes are masterly, the exposition of the boys’ situation — their castration, rigorous training and isolation — dovetailing with a series of insights into the love and humour that binds them. As an image of the spiritual crippling of children inflicted by the very institutions set up to care for them, the idea of orphans
cheated into accepting castration as a sacrifice for vocal purity is potent enough but as a metaphor, developed and extended through action, it becomes marred with inconsistency and over explicitness. Why, for example, is the invisible and therefore doubly menacing principal of the orphanage a Miss Lawson? Her sex is undeniably made an issue by mention of her predilection for Andrew, the stallion in this arena of geldings. Furthermore, it takes a considerable imaginative leap to the theory propounded by one of the play’s all too voluble raisonneurs that "they do it to girls too"; the emotional potency of the castration image is just too restricted. Other in consistencies are more mundane yet equally questionable, such as the suggestion by Michael that the boys will probably treat their children as they them selves have been treated — an immaculate conception? As the structure of the play founders in the increasingly fragmentary final few scenes, the back of the metaphor is broken. Suddenly the action widens to include the whole of the orphanage; the dormitory, hitherto an apparently sufficient model.
now becomes a cell in a wider social structure and the question emerges as to whether each cell has its own version of the father figure, mentor and bully that Andrew has come to represent. News of boys jumping from upper story windows and the threat of fire seem gratuitously introduced to hasten the apocalyptic climax in which Andrew himself will be castrated in- a ritual of misdirected rebellion. Perhaps to hope for a watertight cor relative can be seen as placing a deterministic straightjacket on a play that seeks to explore the issue of freedom and authoritarianism in an essentially allusive and affective manner. Certainly, as a cluster of emotionally charged images and insights Bray’s finely tuned dialogue and Nason’s subtly orchestrated staging cannot be bettered. One’s concern is that the failure of a sustained, productive meta phor to shape the action and events prevents the play from transcending the emotional immediacy of the experience and flowering into the political synthesis required by so profoundly important a theme. THEAT RE AUSTRALIA MAY 1981
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