Bard Bites Back At Snake-oil Pedlar

Newcastle Herald

Monday March 19, 2007

REVIEW KEN LONGWORTH

DEAD WHITE MALES

Presented by: Newcastle Repertory Club

Venue: Newcastle Repertory Theatre, Lambton (4952 4958)

Season: March 14 to 31

PLAYWRIGHT David Williamson made a daring move in Dead White Males by using another dramatist William Shakespeare, no less as a character.

It is daring because the frequent references to Stratford Will's works and the inclusion of a scene from his As You Like It continually serve as a reminder to an audience of his greatness.

Yet Williamson isn't overshadowed. His subject in Dead White Males is the way human nature can become a victim of the extreme ideologies espoused by people who don't live in the real world.

The ivory-tower dweller in this case is one Dr Grant Swain, a lecturer in cultural studies at a Sydney university, who tells his malleable students that Shakespeare only has prominence as a writer because the relationships between men and women in his plays reinforce the order laid down by a patriarchal society.

Nineteen-year-old Angela Judd responds with starry eyes to Swain's pronouncements, largely because they appear to bolster her observations of the male-female pecking order in her family.

But from the start Angela has niggling doubts, leading her to visualise Shakespeare coming to her bedroom to debate the issues with Swain. And when Angela interviews her parents and other family members to gain evidence of what Swain calls patriarchal mythologies, her belief in his dictates is further shaken.

Williamson puts lots of humour into the play and has a lot of fun under-cutting the pretensions of practitioners like Swain who rattle on for hours about things such as non-essential feminism.

But, for me, this is low-voltage Williamson because his good intentions aren't matched by the result, a view reinforced by director Maurie Scott's enjoyable production.

Williamson's characters, with the exception of Angela and her university friends and Shakespeare, are largely caricatures. Scott and his actors try to make the characters real and, while they have reasonable success with the family members, Swain cries out for over-the-top treatment.

Richard Murray makes Swain's snake-oil salesman believable in the first half, but the naturalistic approach doesn't go with Williamson's increasing emphasis on his hypocritical sleaziness in the second act.

The writer takes an opposite tack with the family members.

When first seen at a no-holds-barred birthday celebration, they are stock figures: Mel Nelson's quietly suffering grandfather, Kathleen Warren's nagging grandmother, Paul Sansom's reticent out-of-work father, Marie Warburton's assertive business executive mother, and the aunts of Arlene Richards (comfortably living off alimony) and Suellen Hall (dropped by a married lover for the umpteenth time).

But when Angela interviews some of them, the audience is supposed to take them as undiluted flesh-and-blood and to believe that the secrets they share with her would have remained as such for decades. That stretches credulity.

Alison Cox's questing Angela is a delight, Anika Means has verve as a student ready to use her sex appeal to boost marks, and Lee Mayne is a charmer as a shy male student who feels like a fish out of water in the academic arena.

Dudley Horque's Shakespeare, of course, has the best words.

© 2007 Newcastle Herald

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