HORROR COMES TO UPOTIA

REVIEWER: Angela Bennie.

David Mamet's Oleanna at the Wharf Studio will set your blood racing. It will grip you hard and shake you about until the bones in your body rattle and every fibre of your decency you thought you had crumbles.

Most of its impact comes from Mamet's extraordinary dramatic writing skills, his understanding of dramatic conflict (which has nothing to do with ideas being in conflict and everything to do with human beings being so) and his hard-nosed ability to find a sore on society's delicate, protective skin and dig at it until it bleeds.

But it also comes from Michael Gow's relentless, near-hysterical production of it: from the moment the loud, pompous entr'acte begins, to Cate Blanchett's last panting, beaten gasp, Oleanna is an unstoppable roller-coaster ride to horror.

Not horror in the Hollywood-movie sense; horror in some other deep, moral sense, the kind that accompanies the realisation that it has all come to this, that we have all come to this.

"This" is something quite specific in Oleanna and it begins with Mamet's plot: Carol, a student in education, brings a charge of sexual harassment against her professor, who, as a consequence, loses his job, his house and possibly his family. He is virtually destroyed.

When he discovers the charge has escalated to one of rape at the urging of Carol's "Group" (one presumes these are her hardline politically correct feminist friends, although it is never spelt out), he loses control, attacks her violently, punching, kicking her, yelling "Rape you..I wouldn't touch you with a 10-foot pole, you little cunt." The play ends with the two looking at each other across an enormous abyss.

The "this" is unsettled a little by the brilliance and passion with which Mamet seems to put both sides of the situation, pulling his audience with him one way and then the other. His arguments about education and a teacher's responsibility towards his or her pupil are complex and brought beautifully to bear within the fabric of the work itself. More than this, his plays work like a brief, passionate plea for the intellectual freedom - the title, Oleanna, comes from the name of a song dedicated to the creation of Utopia.

But the intellectual freedom and Mamet's scintillating theatrical games fade into insignificance when one considers the ending. There is something primeval about it, visceral.

Nor does it come from nowhere, it is there, building its way up to the play's surface a;; through the action, until it explodes through into the final moments. And looking down through the fissure, it is possible to glimpse something awful at work in Oleanna, something akin to hatred. It is enough to make your blood curdle.

Is this what we have come to?

If Gow's production answers the question, then it is in the affirmative. There is an aggressive thrust in its energy and phrasing, its pace is urgent. This is necessary for Mamet's theatrical tricks to work, and Gow pushes and pulls the pulleys like a master. His final moment of having John move back behind the huge desk, surrounded by books, to stand looking down at the cowering woman makes the heart pound with its power as an image.

But what is more revealing is this production's attitude to its two characters.

Geoffrey Rush is dynamic as the pompous, patronising, opinionated fop of a teacher, John. But he is also revealed as capable of compassion and care, despite his dreadful self-interest and self concern. He is an individual, a human being with failings, but a human being nevertheless. He is representative of the individual, the member of the status-quo - albeit, and this is significant, too, an elite member of that status quo.

Blanchett as Carol is equally dynamic; she gives a brilliant and sustained, almost frightening, performance. But her brilliance reminds one of a diamond on the edge of a drill; and there is in her rendition of Carol a kind of fanaticism that is mindless, blind, like something inhuman.

And even when Blanchett, good actor that she is, does give her Carol every human quality she can find to give her a human shape, like vulnerability and passion, for example, the writing and direction is against her.

Her role in the play is to be the representative of the Other, the outsider, the Group or collective against the struggling individual; she is the mind-less as opposed to the thought-ful, she is a representative of those who try to change the status quo, who demand space and validity for their agenda - and on ad infinitum, the list is by now very familiar.

In Oleanna the symbol of that subversion is a woman. And in Oleanna, it is male violence alone that beats her into submission.

Welcome to Utopia!

The Sydney Morning Herald, Friday, September 10th, 1993.

Aussie Cate Online © 1999 Lin, Dean, Lance
800x600 screen size recommended.

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