Selected Books (5)
THE PICCADILLY BUSHMAN by Ray Lawler. (Angus & Robertson.)
It is the presumptuous English who think the colonial problem theirs; it belongs to the colonists. Algerian, Australian, whatever — it is they who have to reconcile the demands of parent and indigenous cultures.
An Australian writer, in The Piccadilly Bushman, explains writing as ‘the only way he feels he can get his hands on the sense of his own little hunk of the world’ and the play is — surely — Mr Lawler’s attempt to find the sense of his.
In an earlier play, The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, the play that gave him an international success, Mr Lawler grasped at ‘the sense of’ the Australian’s indulgent myth of himself as strong, bronzed, tough and free. He caught two cane-cutters, members of one of the few remaining seasonal occupations of the kind that gave birth to this nineteenth-century legend, and put them close against the claims of age, sex, suburbia. He showed them breaking against those claims and left them with nothing except a future of mutual pretence, rejecting and rejected by the world around them. This, he said, is what he-manliness and mateship mean. His play was the first serious questioning of those concepts — which still animate Australian politics, life and literature. Despite that, the play succeeded in Australia (and possibly in England) because production was able to sentimentalize its overt sexual relationships and ignore its conclusion, an ending so bitter that it was rewritten in the film-version.
A film-version is the starting-point of his new play. An Australian novel has been turned into ‘a good international script’ for an English film company. ‘In other words, the film’s being made for the overseas market, and it doesn’t much matter that it should be true to us as we really are?’ It is the novelist objecting, because he does care about ‘the intangible difference of this one section of the world’s population as compared with any other’. He is concerned with ‘all the things’ that ‘anchor’ people and although he may be, as the English suggest, ‘a romantic with a national chip on your shoulder’ he does have ‘a way of looking at things’ that is so much part of his background that he can be sure of himself. He has the kind of strength, apparently, that the play’s principals need.
The hero, an actor, more English than the English, has starred at Stratford, etc. He has returned to Australia to make the film and a last effort at reconciliation with his wife. He is successful, famous, without friends. Before the play began, he betrayed his mate (‘you know how close we were’), and that one friend is now dead. ‘He and the few other good things out here that I could no longer fit into my life, I shoved them down and down until I lost all contact with them.’ Now, ‘I can’t stand being on my own any more’, and he wants his son back — son rather than wile, because she hurts.
The wife is difficult. In England, despite Stratford, etc., she drank, took lovers — not for love, as she explains, but for the comfort that there is in a ‘huddling together of the rejected’. She tried then to force her husband into the intimacy of a confession. In Australia, ‘with strong sunlight and sharp rocks’, she succeeds: yes, he did ‘obliterate’ his mate, did marry her for the ticket to England, did resent everything that anchored him to Australia; ‘I loathe and detest this country with everything that’s in me . . . I never belonged here. This is the prison in which I spent my first twenty-four years . . . I’m no special — freak. There are plenty of my sort out here, the throwbacks. But most of them manage to make an adjustment. Most of them. The rest of us fight tooth and nail for the happy chance of becoming an expatriate.’
It is possible, indeed common, to grow up in Australia breathing ‘this sweet smell of exile’, as the wile calls it. She herself has felt it so intensely that she has had to cling to an extravagant and defensive Australianism. ‘You know why I went down the gutter in London? Because in my heart I was certain that all the changes Alec was making in himself were right. Even though I hated them, I had enough of the poison in me to believe in what he was doing. But I couldn’t match him in it, so I tossed myself in with what I thought were the other failures.’
But her actor-husband she now realizes is the biggest failure ‘of the lot’. ‘Expatriate,’ he says, ‘the man who can never accept his own country, and finds that the country he hankers after never accepts him! If you ever want revenge for the fact that I married you as I did, you don’t have to go past that one word.’
The Australia (and the English alternative) the wile tries to define is more than a name on the map; more than accent, position, idiom — things the play shows sometimes lightly and sometimes with clumsy vaudeville distaste. It is understood manners, attitudes, experiences. The English speak ‘roughly the same language, but that doesn’t mean they know what a bushfire smells like on a hot day in February’. There is no one in the Sydney where the play is set who does not know that smell and something of what it means.
It is, of course, only the thinkers in the play — the creative or the uneasy — who are forced to consider their relationship with Australia; the English because they have to work there, the Australians because they are repudiating their class or looking for overseas markets. The two ‘normal’ characters are simply Australian; a press-agent with a surface toughness and cynicism about her own emotion and a ‘servant’ with a ‘Give us a yell if you want us’.
As dialectic, however, the play is nothing (when does an expatriate become a migrant?). As a display of character in conflict, forced by that conflict to feel and to try to articulate, it is fascinating and it would be hard to exaggerate the skill with which Mr Lawler has packed his conventional three-act framework with plot, tension, humour, pathos and theatrical shock — shock that is always the result of character in action. The play ends tentatively, there is no ‘easy comfort’, but the actor and his wife have reversed their roles of weak and strong, each of the characters has acknowledged the need to come to terms with the country where he finds himself and — the colonial problem — wonder whether playing for mother-England’s approval is ever anything other than betrayal.
This last of course is Mr Lawler’s problem. There are not enough theatres in Australia to support him. How is he to retain his hold on the overseas market and still be true to us, the Australians who are the facts he knows and is concerned with?
With Australian inhibition, he will not let us see him looking at his own emotion; he attempts to remove it from himself by giving it to his actor. This is the play’s failing; the reason for its moral unease. For a creative artist, to be born in Australia (or some other colony) may well be the most important thing that happens in his life and to be removed from that country may be either life-crippling or life-making; it is certainly never easy. For a mere actor, like his hero, loss of accent and background is a simple technical problem unless he is a first-class neurotic. For Mr Lawler’s hero to worry about and at it as he does must be a masking of some deeper self-unrest and Mr Lawler does not probe very far in any effort ‘to get his hands on the sense’ of that.
In performance, in Australia, this hardly seemed to matter. Despite a middle-class commercial theatre’s attempt to make the play palatable for audiences holding attitudes caricatured in the play, despite an anonymously slick ‘good international’ production — a betrayal of what the play is for — it seemed too rich in excitement, pleasure and pain for any serious questioning of its validity. It is, however, this failure in validity, this placing of writer’s problems on to actor, that may prevent it reaching a wider audience. Again, although the characters are real anywhere and their feelings true of any society that shares a language with another, the detail of The Piccadilly Bushman — even the rhythmic certainty of its dialogue — is so precisely Australian that Mr Lawler may have to wait till native writers ‘realize’ his script before it can convey its excitements and relevances to audiences in other countries.
Page(s) 90-95
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