There’s some received wisdom that Australian theatre doesn’t write about class, but I think the truth is, we do write about class – it’s just that it’s often about the middle-class. The mainstage theatre companies have to keep subscribers happy, so the perception is that they should appeal to their audience’s lived experience. So, for a long time, because subscription passes paid the bills, programming was safe and Australian plays have avoided centring working class people for a long time.
The irony
is that Australian theatre by and for Australians came to the fore through stories
of the working class. Plays like Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll created a template and the early works of David Williamson, like The Removalists, continued in that tradition. Both writers giving us the
Australia they knew – far away from the plays Williamson would eventually
write, about the angsts of the middle-class.
A similar
evolution can be seen in playwriting in the UK. “Kitchen sink dramas” as a genre
always centred on the working-class for decades, but as here, with funding
drying up and artists from those backgrounds being forced out of the
industry, things started to change. Even Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party
from the 1970s was about a newly middle-class couple as fish-out-of-water; it
began a trend of stories about working-class people aspiring to get out of
their circumstances.
When
Dominic Cooke first took over as Artistic Director of London’s Royal Court in
2006, he said he wanted to explore “what it means to be middle class”. In the wake
of the In-Yer-Face movement of playwrights like Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill
and their ascension to that theatre’s stages in the 1990s, Cooke retreated to
safer ground.
In the lead
up to the premiere of Steve Rodger’s new play, Break of Day, which opened
at the Malthouse this week, there has been a lot of talk about how
working-class stories are rare in the culture. In an interview in ArtsHub, director
Sarah Goodes mentions the movie The Castle, as a mainstream breakthrough
of the characters-on-the-margins we don’t see much. Ironically, that film will
find its way to the stage early in 2027.
The truth
is, though, plays about working class people are still being written and it’s
the mainstage companies who hesitate to program them. The Melbourne Theatre
Company has arguably found some space for working-class stories this year, to
give credit where credit’s due. West Gate and Shoelace Chaser and
Do Not Pass Go all reckoned with people on the margins: working-class,
unemployed or under-employed characters fighting for some dignity against a society
designed against them.
Two of
Melbourne’s great playwrights, Daniel Keene and Patricia Cornelius, are also
committed to writing about people outside the mainstream. Mainstage companies are loathe to program them.
Against this
backdrop, Break of Day is both a rarity (things could swing back to
pleasing the middle class at any time) and a new entry into a long-established type
of Australian writing. The ArtsHub article mentions parallels to Death of a
Salesman, which are very evident – especially having seen the remount of Neil
Armfield’s production last night. (My review of that is still to come.)
Pam (Kat Stewart)
is a single-mother who works an overnight shift at the distribution factory of
a large international distributor of electronics and home goods. It’s Amazon,
but the play doesn’t say that. She lives on the outskirts of a satellite city,
raising her teenage daughter, Rae (Sherry-Lee Watson), who is getting ready to
graduate high school.
Pam is in
conflict with her elderly father, Pop (Richard Piper), who struggles with his
mobility and possibly dementia. She is good friends with her boss, Sanjeeva,
who she went to school with, but the company’s rules are strict and he can’t
afford to give her any leeway – even over toilet breaks. And they are both
worried about being replaced by robots.
The play
takes place over one night, where Rae is desperately battling dodgy wifi and
her grandfather to get an essay written before the 8am deadline. She’s being
distracted by her boyfriend, Jedediah (Theo Clarke), who is more interested in
dreaming their future together than actually studying. He is, though, trying to
memorise a speech by Caliban from The Tempest to pass his drama
assessment.
Steve
Rodger’s script weaves poetic monologues with more prosaic dialogue in the family
scenes. It captures a kind of realism, while also playing into a heightened
reality to capture the daydreams of the two teenagers and the desire of Pam to
see her daughter escape the lives they are living.
The
plotting feels a bit mechanical, though. We are asked to believe that this
final assessment for Rae’s English extension course will define the rest of her
life. Pam wants the best for her child so much so that she’s willing to risk
her job, perhaps the only one she can get in a dying town. Rae is studying Nabokov's Lolita
by choice, but perhaps because she knows that Pop is a pedophile. It’s more
than a little contrived.
The central
premise of Rae “escaping” her life or her mother’s life is also a cliché.
The characters talk of alternatives a lot, but the structure of the drama is
clear. Jedediah tries to convince Rae into changing the town from the inside out,
but it’s hard to know if the appeal he makes is realistic or not. We understand that
the decline of the town is due to economic circumstances and that Amazon, I
mean, unnamed-multinational-corporation has swooped in to take advantage, but Pam
had internalised the idea that she alone is responsible for narrowing Rae's choices.
Sarah Goodes
directs an energetic production that swirls around on Anna Cordingley’s turning
set, that shoves warehouse up against government housing, with a narrow alleyway
in between. Cordingley’s set is wonderfully detailed, from tufts of grass to
some random yarn bombing, but it’s the revolve that really makes everything
sing.
Kat Stewart
is a powerhouse in the role of Pam, selling the desperation of her situation
while also showing love and affection for her daughter. Richard Piper’s Pop is
a real piece of work, swearing and carrying on when he doesn’t get his way. His
work opposite Sherry-Lee Watson’s Rae is rich and fiery, but difficult to watch. The
real highlight of the show is Rae and Jedediah’s budding relationship and the
affection Theo Clarke imbues the young guy with. If there is a hint of a better
future, it’s in how supportive these two characters are of each other – whether
or not they graduate high school or make the lives they dream of.
Watching Break
of Day, I thought of Gary Owen’s play Iphigenia in Splott, which had
a local production at Red Stitch Theatre (of which Kat Stewart in a founding ensemble member). In Owen’s play, a one-person show about a woman on the fringes of
society, Iphigenia provokes us with her opening monologue. She knows
the make-up of a typical theatre audience. She knows she is the kind of person
we might treat as invisible. Pam in Break of Day feels invisible, as
does Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. Attention must be paid and she has some wisdom to lay out for us.
Iphigenia
in Splott is about
how poor people are the first to feel the effects of budget cuts or reduced
services. The play doesn’t suggest she has lived her life wrong or could have
done better. It’s a critique of the system. Local playwright Patricia Cornelius might
be known for co-creating Who’s Afraid of the Working Class, a seminal
Australian play on the subject, but she considers the characters in her own
work to be entirely outside of the class system. We see these characters live without polish or pretence, and no fantasy of escape or an illusion that there is even a way out.
When Rae
explains to her mother why she is studying Lolita, beyond the subject
matter, she talks about the narrator being unreliable. I wondered if maybe Pam,
her mother, the ostensible narrator of Break of Day might equally be
unreliable. Perhaps her dreams of a better life for her daughter is a kind
of delusion; that generational poverty cannot be resolved in one generation.
But I don’t think this production wants us to leave with that feeling. It wants
us to think a society engineered to keep some people in poverty can be dealt
with solely through a good education and a willingness to learn, even though she knows
the robots are coming.
If we’re
going to write plays about class and tell real stories of the working class or an underclass
being created by multinationals, the narratives cannot be unreliable. Rodgers’ script
is thoughtful and compassionate, but he’s crafted a tale with an ending that’s
too simplistic.
- Keith Gow, Theatre First
Break of Day is playing at the Malthouse until August 29
Photos: Pia Johnson
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