If you’ve read the
little print at the back of a program for a Griffin Theatre Company production
over the past five years, you might have noticed a play called Masquerade as being in development. In
2015, co-produced Griffin and
the State
Theatre Company of South Australia as part of the Sydney Festival, Kate Mulvany’s Masquerade
completes its journey to the stage in a production bursting with life, colour,
music and dance. But for all its joyous raucous rambunctiousness, there is a
bittersweet and touching story which makes this story, this production, more
raw and affecting than it might otherwise have been as a relatively ‘straight’
adaptation.
Adapted from Kit Williams’ 1979 book Masquerade – an illustrated treasure
hunt filled with riddles and sumptuous illustrations – Mulvany’s play for “9 to
90-year-olds” is part adventure-story, part bildungsroman,
part riddle, part musical, and – at the insistence of Williams himself – includes
Mulvany’s personal connection to the story as well. On one level, it’s the
story of the Moon as she falls in love with the Sun, and how she sends her
messenger, Jack Hare, to deliver a message to her paramour. On another level,
it’s the story of hospital-bound 10-year-old Joe and his mum as she tells him
the story of Jack, the moon, and the sun. These two storylines, like the
ribbons on a maypole, intertwine and unravel, deepening and complementing each
other until they join together in the second half to create a sequel of sorts
to Williams’ book, inspired by the worldwide treasure hunt it ignited in the
early 1980s.
Directed by Lee
Lewis & Sam
Strong – respectively the current and former artistic directors of Griffin,
and both champions of Mulvany’s adaptation – the production is a visual and
aural cornucopia, full of colour, music, sound, and light, but there’s a
strange kind of alchemy at work here, too. While Lewis and Strong’s direction
is strong, making sure each moment is imbued with its own kind of magic,
something feels lost or perhaps changed in translation onto the Drama Theatre
stage at the Opera House. As Joe’s mum tells him the story of Williams’ Masquerade and it in turn unfolds in
front of us, an unending procession of characters appear and disappear with the
frequency of a turned page and we are brought inside the story, we become a
part of it, but it is necessarily an intensely personal book, full of riddles,
clues and intricate details, which cannot be fully recreated or embodied on a
stage, at least not physically; clues which, although they have one correct
answer, will have a different and equally correct answer to whoever reads it,
whoever enters its world. Part of Masquerade’s
appeal as a book is its emotional connection, its imaginative power – its variability
– and this will be different person to person, reader to audience member,
something that this production – for all its colour, whimsy, life, and theatrical
magic – cannot quite produce.
The visual and
imaginative connection to Mulvany’s Masquerade
is aided by Anna
Cordingley’s whimsical set and costumes. A whirlwind of colour, ingenuity
and vivacity, they not only embody the theatricality of Williams’ illustrations
but translates them into full-blooded and three-dimensional characters and
situations. Physically framed within a storybook sequence of seemingly random
letters, numbers and symbols, the action unfolds as if across the double-page
spread of Williams’ book, which in a way it does. Within this frame though,
some of the action on the topmost level of Cordingley’s rotating and malleable
set – such as the Moon’s directions to Joe, and the scenes with Isaac Newton – are
unfortunately obscured. Geoff
Cobham’s lighting is as richly coloured and as storybook-like as
Cordingley’s set, but the orbiting struts supporting the lighting for the moon
and sun intrude awkwardly upon the space. The music, provided live by
Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen, is a gorgeous fusion of Baltic
cabaret, klezmer, Kurt Weill-esque melodies, haunting violin lines, and accordion
riffs, and suits this alchemical story marvellously well.
As Jack Hare, Nathan O’Keefe is as light-footed and mercurial a Jack
as you could imagine, and his physicality is superb. A natural clown, O’Keefe’s
height and ability to play the humour sincerely and without milking it of its
worth works to the advantage of the production and he is a delight to watch in
his velvet knickerbockers, large ears, braces and oversized feet. As Joe, Jack
Andrew (and Louis Fontaine, on alternating nights) is almost pitch-perfect as
the boy who dreams of walking outside; his sincerity and honesty right to the
end is disarming and incredibly moving. Helen Dallimore as Tessa, Joe’s mother,
while a little quiet at times, has a fragile strength about her and we never
see her as anything other than compassionate and loving, no matter what Penny
Pockets might have her or us believe. Kate Cheel’s Moon is a mercurial vision
in silver pleats with a white shock of disco-era hair; her Tara Treetops – in
wide-brimmed hat, brightly coloured layered hooped dress and boots – is a Mary
Poppins-esque vision of precision, order and magic, complete with animatronic
crow. Zindzi Okenyo as everything from a flatulent nurse to Penny Pockets (a
seller of goods and bads), Fat Pig, the personification of Dawn, and a fish is
unrecognizable in each incarnation, and plays with gusto and energy throughout.
As the Sun, Mikelangelo (of the Black Sea Gentlemen) is gruff and somewhat
distant, looking like a rockabilly minstrel in his gold suit, guitar, and
slicked-back hair; his realization of why people shield their eyes from him is
both moving and almost child-like in its logic. Pip Branson – one of the Black
Sea Gentlemen and, with Mikelangelo, the production’s composer and musical
director – plays a lispy be-ruffled Isaac Newton (complete with obligatory apple),
and as a musician supplies the haunting violin melodies which keep the
production moving, perfectly suited to that character of The Man Who Plays The
Music That Makes The World Go Round (or Time, as you might otherwise know him).
The remaining Black Sea Gentlemen, when not accompanying the action as
musicians, bring warmth and wit to a (new) scene suggested by Kit Williams himself,
as an incomplete quartet of barbers. Under Lewis and Strong’s direction, no
actor or character feels as though they are out of place, and no performance is
too big or not pitched right, and each feels as though they are part of the
world of Masquerade, as though they
are as they have always been.
Mulvany’s script is full of life, full of wit and love and
inventiveness, and it is crammed with nothing short of the utmost admiration,
love and respect for Williams’ book. There is something of Neil Gaiman’s
wordplay, charisma, and delight in puns in Mulvany’s writing too, and it is a
treat to see it unfold all together (even if some of the cod-swearing seems a
touch out of place). But in adapting the book and its subsequent treasure hunt
into a piece of theatre, something of the elusive emotional magic is taken away
from the tale. This is, in a way, where Mulvany’s own journey comes in and how it
comes to bear upon the script’s jigsaw-like structure: by adding the story of a
sick boy in hospital reading the book with his mum, we as an audience are given
a way into the story which mirrors Mulvany’s own experience, and charges Jack
Hare’s journey with a very real emotional weight that the story might not
otherwise have. And, for the most part, it works. It is only in the final scene
of the play, as the treasure hunt and the moon and sun’s stories collide in a
cosmic ballet of love, forgiveness and reunion, that the play becomes unstuck –
there is perhaps too much resonance in the final beat that remains only hinted
at, unspoken, left to the audience’s imagination, that puts a harrowing spin on
the otherwise beautiful story. But, just as The Doctor told us in Provence
I really wanted to
love Masquerade. The story – in
Williams’ book, as a treasure hunt, the ‘scandal’ of its solution, in Mulvany’s
own personal journey with the book, in the play’s journey to the stage, in its
current theatrical incarnation – is beguiling, beautiful, whimsical, thrilling,
and heartwrenching in equal measure, and it is a treat from beginning to end.
But part of me cannot love this production, and I still don’t know exactly why,
even now, days later. Like Williams’ book, it works on many different levels at
once, some of which are explicit while others are oblique, but the sum of its
parts didn’t quite work its alchemical power on me as much as I would have
liked. Perhaps, as Tessa tells Joe, there is a little bit of room left for some
magic to yet be worked, as it begins its journey around the country on a
national festival tour.
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