The inner city Genesian Theatre Company’s current production is a revival of leading Australian playwright David Williamson’s confronting 1995 play ‘Dead White Males’.
Similar to British playwright David Hare, Williamson is a playwright who likes to take on important issues. His canon includes plays on sexual harassment, police corruption, and community conferencing. In this play Williamson weighed into the intellectual literary debate circulating around Australian Universities in relation to French post-structuralist theory diminishing the value of the Western literary and intellectual tradition.
There were two notable firsts to this production. The revival represented the first Williamson play the Genesian theatre has staged in over fifty years of productions. It is also the first play that Tom Massey, a regular performer with the company, has directed for a main-stage season.
This Williamson piece sees the playwright fired up and committed, and this comes across strongly in Massey’s debut production. The audience sees the playwright strongly defend the integrity of Western literature and rail against what he perceives as indulgent and hypocritical academics.
Williamson does this through his main character, impressionable, young university student, Angela Judd. The play sees Angela explore deeply both sides of the intellectual debate.
On one side is English lit lecturer Dr Grant Swain, a post-structuralist of the Michael Foucault school who lectures his students that the literature of the dead white males is superficial and based on out-dated ideological principles.
On the other side is the great liberal humanist William Shakespeare who ‘appears’ to her at various times arguing that yes, permanent truths about human nature do exist and that literature is a great way of communicating them. By play’s end Angela knows clearly where she stands.
The three leading roles are well performed. Matt Jones’s Dr Swain is a deeply flawed character, fiercely intellectual and yet flagrantly hypocritical. At one point he complains about the break-up of his marriage, and even quotes Shakespeare, ‘frailty, this name is woman’. More than a bit of a faux pas!
Sophie Blacklaw as Angela Judd conveyed her characters’ angst with having two weighty intellects competing for her attention.
David Woodland made for a warm, effusive Shakespeare patiently, and with plenty of guile, waiting for Angela to see the right path.
Emily Potts and Matthew Blackwood Hume stood out in the supporting cast as two of Angela’s university colleagues also caught up in the literary fall-out.
‘Dead White Males’ took place in two settings, the campus and the Judd family home, which were well covered in Catherine Lock’s compact set design.
Now that the ice has broken hopefully it won’t be too long before another David Williamson play graces the Genesian stage. Tom Massey’s production plays the Genesian Theatre, 420 Kent street, Sydney until Saturday 7th August, 2010.