Good fun and home truths
Only Heaven Knows
By Alex Harding
Directed by Peter Nettell
New Theatre, Newtown
Friday-Sunday until December 19
Bookings 9873-3575
Review by Helen Jarvis
Sydney forms the setting and the subject of this musical play. Not just Sydney, but Kings Cross as it was in 1944 and again in 1956.
Tim (Paul Flynn) a 17-year-old innocent from Melbourne, arrives with a Globite suitcase, short-sleeved shirt, battered hat and a big smile, singing with excitement for what opportunities wartime Sydney can bring.
Swiftly disillusioned by the stealing of his suitcase and all his worldly goods, Tim finds himself a room — with Guinea (Alice Livingstone), a club singer; and a job — serving in a delicatessen.
As he too becomes one of the characters of the Cross, Tim awakens to his homosexuality, soon forming a loving and stable relationship with Cliff (Mark Fuller), a dinky-di Aussie sort of a bloke. Two other people form the central characters of the play — Alan (Lloyd King), Cliff's former lover in the army (both were jailed for their sexual liaison); and Lana, a stereotypical, ageing queen.
The play consists of songs and vignettes drawn from the lives of the five as they face the world and each other.
A bright and boisterous scene of their getting ready for a big fancy dress party ends the first act as they dance the conga off the stage to the party, where a blind orchestra has been hired to allow gay love and lust to be flaunted (a hint at the homophobia prevailing outside the Cross).
The mood has changed by 1956 — deep in the Menzies era, with conservatism and the nuclear family as the dominant paradigm. Tim and Cliff are still together but starting to fall apart as Tim reaches out to develop as a playwright while Cliff is saving up madly for that dream suburban house — with a letterbox!
The tension between the two of them is overwhelmed, however, by Alan's crisis as he tries to deny his homosexuality.
The two acts are linked by the spirit of Lea Sonia (Benjamin O'Reilly), a drag queen of the 1940s who was bashed in Oxford Street and run over by a tram.
Lea floats in and out of the action, a device that enables the playwright to introduce wry comments and to draw contrasts with the gay world of today. However, for me this was the weakest part of the play, as Lea's over-the-top costumes and demeanour cut across the domestic and day-to-day concerns that give this play its special character, as it tenderly brings us all the characters who made up Kings Cross, showing both the pleasures and the pain they suffered in those two eras.
The setting and the atmosphere of the Cross are beautifully conjured, and brought back to life the place I knew as a small child living in Springfield Avenue, where my back window had the same view across to the Harbour Bridge and the Luna Park face, and then again as a teenager when I had summer holiday jobs ironing shirts in the local laundry and cleaning the stage at the newly opened Les Girls Theatre.
I'm sure I knew Guinea and Lana, Cliff and Tim, and Alan too — as well as Bertie, the Australian terrier who is there, but not there, throughout the play.
Playwright Alex Harding was a founding member of England's Gay Sweatshop Theatre Company in 1975, and has lived in Sydney since 1984.
The play was written in 1989 and this is its third Sydney production, directed admirably by Peter Nettell. In true New Theatre style, it is strongly played on a minimal but striking set. John Short's music sets a jaunty yet nostalgic tone, and the singing is great. Go and see it for a fun night out with more than a few home truths.