Barrie, meet David

By Mark Stoyich

Barrie Kosky, the one-man avant-garde of Australia's subsidised mainstream theatre, doesn't so much produce a play as infect it, take it over from within and reform it in his own image -- something like one of those Hollywood alien monsters that emerges from its victim's stomach. So there's almost no point talking about the play in question.

Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O'Neill's attempt at giving Greek myth a deep-fried southern setting, was one of a number of plays he wrote before World War II aimed at revealing the psychological motives behind his characters' conventional behaviour.

It is rather enjoyable in a ludicrous melodramatic way, with its crude early Freudian “insights” into people's sexual needs (“You lusted after that native!”, “Yes, yes! I wanted to learn what it is to love in a pure, natural way!”). It is just begging to be turned into a Bette Davis movie, full of crinolines and sausage-curl wigs and “Negro” servants.

Instead, it gets the Kosky treatment, which means that the actors don't try to sound like southerners but do sound (and often look) like Darlinghurst de-toxers, either slurring their lines or delivering them with a manic intensity at inappropriate moments.

The set does not contain a plantation mansion but some of the fetishes and monsters familiar from other Kosky productions, including a fluorescent dog's head which intermittently breathes steam at the actors, a sort of aluminium ship, a leopard faux-fur-covered thing that could be a fish with a big red eye or a woman's shoe and other fun objects that Kosky must recall from a bad trip (probably to Germany).

Moments of high emotional tension are marked with very loud noises, of necessity as the actors may have chosen that moment to sleep-walk.

In my review of David Williamson's After the Ball, I pointed out that Williamson was an intelligent writer, good at analysis of issues, but with no sense of the theatrical. Barrie Kosky is his exact opposite: plenty of theatrical gestures but absolutely no idea in his head worth applying them to.

His modus operandi is to take a classic or famous play that is a product of its time and place, strip it entirely of its context and reset it in his own dream world. As a result, the work no longer says anything about its original social context or anything new about contemporary society either.

Kosky did this with Moliere's Tartuffe, which he turned into a wildly inappropriate vehicle for his nightmare vision of Australian suburban life. Loaded with over-the-top burlesque without ever being funny, weighed down with references that never say anything, ugly, loud and garish without ever coming to life, Moliere's masterpiece became a theatrical experience without parallel for me until my recent extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth.

This sort of thing works when the original is very weak or melodramatic -- as it did in his two opera productions, Nabucco and The Flying Dutchman. But why pick on a great writer like Moliere? Or even a second-rater like O'Neill?

Kosky is trying to bring some of the shaking-up and bourgeoisie-shocking sophistication and innovation that goes on in European theatre to Australia, the opposite extreme to Williamson's stodgy Australian-ness. This is why he's so indulged by theatres and critics here, in the vain hope it might attract young people.

I wish some mad scientist would unnaturally graft Kosky and Williamson together, so that Australia would at last have a monstrous but satisfying theatrical whole.

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