The Sydney Theatre Company has kicked off its 2005 season with New Zealand writer Tom Scott’s play ‘The Daylight Atheist’, directed by Adam Cook.
The play is a one hander featuring Max Cullen, one of our most celebrated actors. Cullen plays Dan Moffat, a bitter and bombastic drunk who, despite having been married and having sired six children, ends up living out his life in a bachelor room. The playwright has written the play out of his childhood memories and has based the character of Moffat on his late father.

The audience sees Moffat reflecting on the journey of his life from his childhood in Northern Ireland, migration to New Zealand, service in the war, work in the shipping industry, and his difficult marriage and family life. The plays’ title refers to Moffat’s dislike of night and darkness from his childhood. As Moffat says, during the day I don’t need God, at night I need him desperately.

I’ll say straight off that this was not one of my peak experiences in the theatre, it was more in the mid range. I found Max Cullen in fine form, though he stumbled over his lines are a little. Cullen is one of our theatrical treasures, and has that trait that all good performers have, he holds an audience in the palm of his hand. I found the portrait of Dan Moffat to be a poignant one. It was the study of yet another man broken down by alcohol abuse. The tide of his life went against him. He was faced with his unhappy marriage, and didn’t have the nouse to turn things around.

I didn’t find Moffat a very sympathetic character. More to the point, I found him quite an insulting person. I’m really put off by men who put down their own wives, calling his wife Dingbat, and one of his own children, Egghead. When I heard these nicknames, part of my heart separated from the play and never returned! Scott’s a good writer, if only he had written about a more appealing subject, but then perhaps he had to exorcise the demons!

The most remarkable feature of the production was Dean Hill’s outstanding set design that so brought home Moffat’s desolate existence. The rain coming through the holes in the ceiling… the crooked blinds…the power cables running everywhere in the room, and continuously having to switch power points on and off to get simple things to work, such as boiling the kettle. In the Sydney Theatre Company’s program it is noted that Hill’s inspiration for the set was the late, great artist Francis Bacon’s studio apartment.