Conventional heresy

Heretic
By David Williamson
Directed by Wayne Harrison
Sydney Theatre Company
Drama Theatre, Opera House
Reviewed by Allen Myers

The story of Derek Freeman and Margaret Mead is the very stuff of drama. Research which has dominated a scientific discipline for decades is fundamentally flawed. The error is discovered, largely accidentally, by an emotionally unstable young academic, who finds that the pillars of the intellectual establishment aren't willing to listen.

Williamson chose to base the play, as much as practicable, on fact. Since the real Freeman-Mead controversy in anthropology covered several decades, a realistic presentation would risk dissipating the dramatic confrontation. The danger is avoided by presenting the entire action as Freeman's dream. The device works well, allowing the action to maintain a feeling of immediacy and continuity while skipping from place to place and time to time as required.

It also provides the opportunity to introduce elements of music, dance and humour to offset what otherwise might have become too academic a dialogue. Director Wayne Harrison has made the most of it, giving the production a strong feeling of cabaret that contrasts nicely with the seriousness of the intellectual debate.

A large part of the credit for this structure working so well is due to Henri Szeps, who plays Rick Cooper, an anthropologist acquaintance of both Mead and Freeman. Szeps is excellent in a role that is part narrator, part cabaret master of ceremonies, part Greek chorus.

Also deserving bouquets are Robin Ramsay as the old Derek Freeman and Elizabeth Alexander as Margaret Mead in every age and mood from brash youth to advanced "sainthood". And special mention should be made of Jane Harders, who as Monica Freeman, Derek's wife, creates an interesting and convincing character from not all that much in the way of lines.

Heretic is staged and directed with verve, and performed with inspiration by an accomplished cast. The result, not surprisingly, is solid, entertaining theatre. But the question is, why haven't all these promising ingredients produced something closer to really memorable theatre?

The weakness, I think, is in the treatment of the intellectual substance of the Freeman-Mead controversy. The two are protagonists, respectively, of two sides in the nature-nurture debate — the dispute over the relative weight of genetics and social conditioning in determining human behaviour. Playwright David Williamson has not succeeded in throwing any new light on this dispute or even suggesting a different vantage point.

Mead is presented as the inspiration of 1960s optimism about the ability to change human nature by adopting more "rational" social norms, such as she believed, mistakenly, she had discovered in Samoa. Freeman, by contrast, is the representative of 1950s, conservative values, the belief that much or most of what we are is biologically determined.

Williamson seems unaware that these two positions are far from covering the extremes of the dispute. What we end up with in the Mead-Freeman conflict is a debate between liberalism and conservatism, in which no other views are even conceived of.

Mead believes we can change human nature by changing "what we teach our children"; Freeman believes that biology will determine our children's behaviour much more than what they are taught (despite logic, this belief doesn't stop conservatives from worrying a great deal about what children are taught). Neither (at least not in the play) considers that the conditions under which a society produces its life — both the physical conditions and the relations between social groups — might have some bearing on the matter.

Mead's position is based on demonstrably false evidence. Freeman therefore "wins" the debate by default. His victory is the affirmation of an abstract "choice", which Williamson seeks to identify with heresy through nothing but etymology.

But that kind of "choice" in politics is code for blaming the oppressed for their oppression. It's a very conventional "heresy", whose proponents needn't fear an Inquisition.

From GLW issue 226