Gossamer
Written by John Misto
Directed by Crispin Taylor
With Paul Goddard, Betty Lucas, Vic Rooney, William Zappa, Beth Armstrong and Beth Daly
Ensemble Theatre, Sydney
Review by Mark Stoyich
These days, the word "fairy" has lost its original meaning, almost to the same extent as the word "gay ". But, until quite recently, these supernatural creatures had powerful meanings for country people, especially in northern Europe and Ireland where some still connect them with mysterious aspects of nature and sexuality. In England, the little people had their last gasp as a pressure group in the 1920s.
Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the main characters in Misto's play, is known today as the writer of the Sherlock Holmes stories and a representative of the English old fart brigade, but in his day he was highly regarded. If he wasn't actually political, he was a nice man who thought Britain should give Ireland its freedom, and opposed fox-hunting. He also defended Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, although he may not have understood it.
In the 1920s, however, he lost all credibility with the public over his campaign on behalf of the supernatural, when two little girls produced photos of fairies, whose authenticity was championed by Conan Doyle. Could the photos have been a put-up job by the establishment to discredit the man? This is the intriguing question posed by John Misto in Gossamer.
Misto first showed his flair for witty satire grounded in fact in the ABC series The Damnation of Harvey McHugh. He does it again in this play, where he reminds us of the hunger people felt for affirmation of the after-life soon after the "Great War" during which so many had lost a male relative.
Conan Doyle has lost his only son in the war and spends the rest of the play trying to contact him again. When the two girls come along with their photos, which have been pronounced authentic by experts, Conan Doyle pounces on them as proof of the existence of spirits.
Through this obsessional quest he makes friends with escape artist Harry Houdini, who longs to speak to his dead mother. But Houdini knows a con when he sees one and begs Sir Arthur to keep quiet about the girls. He regards it as a personal challenge to find out how the photos were faked. He never does.
Jumping forward to the 1980s, Frances, the surviving witness of the fairies' appearance and now in a nursing home, maintains it was all real. Enter the only entirely fictional character, a male nurse. This ambiguous young man is both aggressively curious about the old lady's past, but also dreads hearing her talk about the fairies, whose sometimes sinister influence seems to permeate the old lady's room.
The male nurse is not what he seems either, and it becomes clear he has been sent to spy on her. Like Houdini, he is determined to make her confess. In Misto's brilliant scenario, another very famous person, of the royal variety, is caught up in the gossamer web woven by the fairies!
Paul Goddard is perfect in the role of the duplicitous young man. Betty Lucas is perhaps too sweet as the naughty girl grown old. Vic Rooney is touching as Conan Doyle, bluffly and confidently talking away his credibility, and William Zappa is good as the relentlessly on-the-make Houdini.
Decades of Disney and Hollywood schmaltz have made fairies an uninteresting proposition for us today, but Misto shows them as symbols of pre-industrial nature and pre-adult fantasy, who had better survive in some form if we are to.