By Darby Turnbull
White Australia, notoriously, has a somewhat abstract relationship with our recent history. Westgate currently playing at MTC and this revival of Tom Holloway’s Beyond the Neck both explore monumental events, the impact on the victims, their loved ones, national identity, not to mention government policy. Despite their importance, the impacts are quickly obscured and a form of Cultural Amnesia pervades. Yes, we have an awareness that it happened, but what meaning has been wrought from it?
There’s a grim prescience to this revival of Holloway’s 2012 play (originally performed at Red Stitch) which was programmed prior to the Bondi Massacre last year. After nearly four months of cascading attempts to control the narrative around that tragedy, it’s somewhat chilling to engage with Port Arthur’s 1996 massacre with nearly 30 years of permeation.
Described as A quartet on loss and violence Holloway very precisely focuses on the visceral effects of trauma from four different perspectives; an old man, a young boy, a teen girl and a mother; each playing their own discordant notes and periodically finding synergy in the universality of grief and trauma.
Suzanne Chaundy returns as Director after leading the debut production (which I didn’t see unfortunately) but her vast experience in Opera and Music provides a perspective on Holloway’s text is intellectually rigorous, clean and unsentimental allowing the horror and pain to envelop organically.
The text explicitly explores Port Arthur as a site of tragedy, the massacre of 1996 starkly stands atop the brutal legacy of convict internment. This particular penal colony was especially notable in that it imprisoned ‘repeat offenders’ who were tortured into insanity with the use of dehumanising methods such as solitary confinement. Holloway’s text doesn’t extend to exploring the genocide and displacement of the Pydairrerme people to make way for the prison and accompanying asylum though you can practically feel the echoes of trauma across generations, ‘History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes’(Mark Twain).
Chaundy and Holloway neatly engage with the telling and representation of history and experience in Art. Philip Mcleod’s compositions for this production, a maudlin and reverent string quartet and the decision to utilise a giant reproduction of Rodney Pople’s Port Arthur provide a dissonant classicism . The use of Pople’s painting is especially interesting given the intense backlash when he received the Glover Art Prize in 2012 for this painting due to the inclusion of an image of Bryant holding a gun and a wilful misunderstanding of what that represented.
I wonder if anyone in the audience remembers that, I didn’t until I looked it up. It’s a subliminal reminder of the culture of silence that pervades our society.
Evasion and silence is all over Holloway’s text and the consequences of it are far reaching and grim. Sometimes the text feels like a group therapy session with strict boundaries around limits, there’s a repeated refrain of ‘stop’ when the narrative veers into uncomfortable territory.
In addition to two characters directly impacted by the massacre, Holloway also provides a slight misdirect by including the stories of two people’s experience of loss and violence that don’t bear a connection to the massacre itself but are flared up by its spectre. It offers a refreshing insight into the possibility that by engaging with national trauma it might provide some catharsis in our more personal, private tragedies.
Recent high school graduate Freddy Collyer is startlingly effective as a troubled young boy who’s a naive but disruptive force, clearly experiencing an internal crisis that his family is unequal to. Cassidy Dunn as the teenage girl skillfully conceals her character’s rage and loneliness behind a gruff, adolescent surliness activated by online conspiracy theories surrounding the massacre where her father was murdered. Both performers are matter of fact in their depictions of youth and the failure of the adults around them to effectively intercede on their behalf.
Emmaline Carroll Southwell as the bereaved mother and victim of a random and senseless tragedy has a compelling dissociative brittleness and wry wit and holds so much space for the emotions her character hasn’t allowed herself to acknowledge but are rapidly taking over her body.
Francis Greenslade as the Óld Man’ is masterful, playing a tour guide and our entry’ into the story, he’s a warm but combustible presence. He palpably conveys the long lasting effects of PTSD through masculine stoicism and a wrenching physical recreation to the trauma. He’s one of our most respected actors for a reason and the rhythm and pace of his monologues provide a masterclass for students of text.
Beyond the neck, to my knowledge, is unlikely to inspire the level of controversy (or any) that Pople’s painting did; there’s a care and a reverence for what was experienced but a deliberate distance that lets the audience reflect without reaching for anything as elusive as conclusions. I felt a deep sadness at our willingness to commemorate and mourn the injustice of the past from a comfortable distance and disgust at our persistence in repeating it. This production very succinctly asks us to examine art not merely as an artefact but as a tool in our own consciousness. With the arts being defunded, censored and undervalued at alarming rates it’s more vital than ever to engage.
Image: Steven Mitchell Wright
