Troppo Fest
Butundi is bogus, but the fable is real. Colour Sergeant Atkins holds his ground in this humid Nowheresville, sworn to the colours of his flag, a staunch servant of King and country, guarding his carrot plot against marauding natives.
The Colours is a well-populated monologue-in-progress written and performed by stage dynamo, Peter Houghton, the final play in the Hard Lines series to run this spring. (Houghton’s current hit The Pitch has earned a reprise at Malthouse this December.) The energy is high too a point of manic as Atkins invokes the fallible ghosts of old soldiers from his past – the Marxist Poole, the Irish git Kemp, the po-mo vaudevillian Schmertz – filling his Butundi garrison with argument and battlefield flashes.
It’s a magnetic show – fast, funny with regular saber cuts to keep war’s madness in focus. During the man’s last carrot vigil we are swept through a vivid tally of British engagements from Napoleon forward, as if Atkins himself tended every trench.
I must admit, given the script was first intended to explore sport, obviously before the motifs of war seized control, I was waiting for the metaphor of team-colours and turf defence to arise from the rave, but I can see why Houghton stuck literally to his guns. I’m thinking just a lick of Silvo will be all the polish the play requires to launch another one-man tour. A privilege to see.
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After the show, Hard Lines coordinator Julian Meyrick said tuppence worth about the whole experiment. Meyrick is set to resign this year, and the jury remains out as to whether this vital hatchery will continue. With so few places for local stuff to find its voice, you can only hope so. Meyrick certainly pleaded an eloquent case for the defence.
He labels the program as a small door into a big room. Whether that means the professional stage, or simply the discipline of understanding script – and its ‘public architecture’ – the door is one of few available to the literate unwashed.
For such a collective endeavour, theatre tends to banish the playwright into isolation. A lifeline like Hard Lines offers that crucial conversation, since no script is born in a vacuum. Or only poor ones anyway. Nothing akin to those I saw captured here.