audience to see what has been to many an unseen masterpiece. It is directed, in another un characteristic, but also very welcome move, by APG/Hoopla/Playbox person Graeme Blundell, and designed for the proscenium this time, by Peter Corrigan. The casting reflects the compulsory changes that have occurred in the Melbourne theatre with the rapid decline in working opportunities. The schisms of old have become an absence of alternatives now. Perhaps that’s a good thing, because Blundell has been able to overcome a problem in the original production — the leap of faith needed to appreciate a young actor playing old Les. Now we have the more appropriately vintage Fred Parslow as Les, Marion Edward as Irene, Syd Conabere and Brian James, distinguished performers all, and in a nice expression of the new deal, former APG great Evelyn Krape, rocker and theatre musician Red Symons and magician Doug Tremlett from the burgeoning theatre restaurant talent school. Blundell aims to develop the realistic side of the play as much as the expressionistic, emphasising its basis, Les’s basis as a ‘real’ person, a ‘real’ Melbourne person. With Romeril, he wants to give it its chance as a kind of Australian Death of a Salesman, with Les as a characteristic kind of Austra lian man, perhaps better able to be understood in 1982, than he was in 1974, or than his precursor was in The One Day of the Year. Romeril and Blundell view the play as a “clash between Japanese culture at its highest and Australian culture at its lowest”, for possession of Les. Romeril like Shepard, Hare and other living writers, says that tragedy is possible in working class characters, that it means something, objectively, to a contempor ary audience, and that it does not require the slavish acceptance of the debased “naturalistic” form. We can see all this in a kaleidoscope of quick changes, a luna park on water, a side-show commented on visually by Peter Corrigan, in the performances of actors who can sing, dance and do magic as well as act. It’s to be hoped this production really works. If The Floating World sinks, then so do a raft of other modern Aussie classics. 12
THEATRE AUSTRALIA MAY 1982
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P e te r C o rrig a n ’s origin al design / o r the A P G P rodu ction of I he Floating World.