Medea Goes Bush
Let’s say you want to write about a toxic love triangle, based in rural Australia. Two dysfunctional brothers – the drab opportunist and the blue-tongued bogan – carry a torch for a rustic spunk named ‘Rache’.
To spice the recipe, throw in the family home, add the family weatherboard just days away from developer’s dozers, and the whole delicate biz of inheritance rights.
Right there you have a play. Excepting a medievalist named Felix Nobis opted to push the envelope a country bloody mile, setting his entire script – The Boy Out Of The Country – in colloquial rhyme.
Why, you ask. I know I did, watching the triangle take shape last night at Hard Lines, the nourishing initiative of the Melbourne Theatre Company. Audience only got to see the first 50 minutes – enough for the rhythm and plot to engulf.
Hunter and Gordon – the brothers – feint and sway around each other, umpired by the ambivalent Rache, observed by the world-weary cop, and the virulent mother. And the reason for rhyme, I figured, is to entrench the timeless-inevitable into the story, those archaic vices and age-old motives, never losing an ear for the vernacular.
It’s a terrific, ambitious, intense work of theatre, word-heavy in that Milkwood way, but leavened by sub-scenes of lyric nostalgia and frequent rabbit-punches of humour and spite. Take a bow, Felix. The play packs real punch. I can only hope the Aussie hordes are hankering for a parochial (yet universal) tragedy arranged in iambic ocker.
More on the Hard Lines showcase, including the alchemy of Peter Houghton and Julian Meyrick, in posts to come.