By Adam Rafferty
In one of his earliest works, prolific Australian playwright David Williamson wrote a show to be performed at La Mama based on a true tale told to him by a removalist who was helping him shift house. The removalist recounted how he’d recently worked a job where a pair of sisters had enlisted the help of two cops to move the younger woman’s furniture out of the home she’d shared with an abusive husband, who had to be physically restrained when he found out his wife was leaving him.
More than fifty years later, when looking for a play to reflect on the troubling recent murders of women in Ballarat, Director Anne-Louise Sarks concluded that Williamson’s work from 1971 could be an appropriate reflection of today’s issues of domestic and gender-based violence. In fact, The Removalists is a broad reflection on male initiated violence, including police brutality and the abuse of authority, but it’s certainly of its time. For while the themes are just as relevant today, the way both men and women would behave in such situations in 2025 is very different, though arguably without improvement, than how these very 1970s Aussies approach the problem.
The story begins in a suburban cop shop, where a wet-behind-the-ears Constable Ross (William McKenna) is getting his induction by seasoned and cynical Sergeant Simmonds (Steve Mouzakis). Simmonds is in the midst of sharing his many chauvinistic attitudes with his young report when two sisters, Kate (Jessica Clarke) and Fiona (Eloise Mignon), enter the station and ask to file a report of spousal abuse against Fiona’s husband Kenny (Michael Whalley). Kate, a woman who has ‘married well’ is assertive and self-assured, while Fiona is understandably timorous and apprehensive about the idea of arresting her husband. She just wants to move out, taking the furniture she’d paid for with her, while he’s at the pub on a Friday night. Simmonds sees this as an opportunity for him and Ross to offer their services and attain a sexual reward from the women, unbeknownst to them.
As a premise, it’s pretty brutal and ugly, but Williamson paints the picture with great swathes of dark humour, especially when the Removalist (Martin Blum), with all his self-important asides, arrives on the scene – perhaps the author was reserving the best jokes for his own performance, as Williamson himself originated the role in ’71. Sarks has kept this production set in the 1970s, with all its Stubbie shorts, Melbourne Bitter and ocker traits at the fore, which in combination with Williamson’s jokes makes for more of a caricature of Aussie life fifty-odd years ago, than it does a black comedy with pertinence to today.
The director has also made the puzzling choice of putting seating on stage for this production, for reasons that don’t seem to be forthcoming, at least when you’re sat on the usual side of the proscenium arch. Stage fighting, directed superbly here by Nigel Poulton, is generally best appreciated with a bit of distance, rather than exposing the craft by forcing the actors to make it believable from all sides. So, the idea that perhaps this set up makes for a more confronting experience for the audience seems counterintuitive, although they are likely to be more uncomfortable considering the almost 2-hour (no interval) playtime and the lack of cushioning on the ‘pull-out’ seating that’s used on stage – be warned.
Performances are excellent however, with Mouzakis delivering a classically creepy cop, Whalley creating a brilliantly awful abusive husband and Blum a delightfully droll house mover. McKenna is a fantastic actor and imparts the green Constable well, but feels miscast when it comes to exposing the barbaric side of the young man’s nature. Clarke and Mignon are truthful to the past, accepting the obnoxious behaviour of the men around them as they’re simply “used to it”, while finding their own crafty ways to escape the brutalism.
You’d have to be pretty oblivious not to be confronted by the play’s commentary on violence and abuse of power, but in the context of today’s worsened domestic violence statistics, this museum piece doesn’t feel like the best possible way to uncover the issue for a modern audience.
Image: Pia Johnson
