A darling of the
Australian literary landscape ever since it was published in 2009, Craig
Silvey’s Jasper Jones is
the story of fourteen year old Charlie Bucktin who lives in small-town Western Australia
Drenched in the
very Australian golden light, Michael
Hankin’s set is quintessentially Australian, but the presence of the
gumtree reaching up and over the stage creates a sense of menace, a darkness
which Silvey, Mulvany, and director Anne-Louise
Sarks use to particular effect throughout the play to add mood, locations,
and character to the West-Australian town of Corrigan. Centre-stage stands
Charlie’s house, realised in all its dusty sun-blown detail, but it is also many
other houses besides, created through two movable sections which are rearranged
as necessary; in these instances, even though they are created through moving
two large set pieces around, there’s a sense of movement, of urgency which adds
to Jasper and Charlie’s search for the truth. Mel
Page’s costumes are also fine-tuned to the period detail of the 1960s, to
small-town Australia
Tom
Conroy brings a geeky teenagerness to Charlie which is both warming and
gently achingly accurate. While in other instances a performance this earnest
might seem overly saccharine, here Conroy’s eagerness, enthusiasm, and
confusion draw us further in to the story, make us want to know what happens,
make us care about him, about Jasper, about Laura, Eliza, and all the rest of
them. Guy
Simon’s Jasper is cheeky at times, but there’s a strength to him, a slight
weariness which makes him determined, dangerous, powerful, and it makes a nice
contrast to Conroy’s wide-eyed naivety. Like Conroy, Matilda
Ridgway’s Eliza captures the awkward teenagerness of her character with
surprising accuracy, and there are many moments where her interactions with
Charlie are heartwarming, tender, and eversoslightly emotionally painful,
albeit in a nostalgic way. Ridgway also plays Laura, Eliza’s older sister, and
the contrast between her characterisation of the two sisters – often with
barely a moment between them – are poignant and quite moving.
As Jeffrey Lu,
Charlie’s cricket-mad friend, Charles
Wu has the potential to go down in the history of Belvoir as one of the
theatre’s favourite underdogs, just as his literary counterpart is many
people’s favourite character in Silvey’s novel. (And yes, the cricket scene is
there, in all its beautiful detail.) But underneath his enthusiasm, his
multiple cries of “Sasssssytime!”, and his running series of “Would you
prefer…” questions with Charlie is a poignant realisation that he is very much
an outsider, just as Jasper Jones is, that his outsiderness is very much a part
of his daily life, one he has grown up with. But it still doesn’t make his
sadness at his father’s ruined garden or the fate of his Vietnamese relatives
any less moving or pertinent. Kate Mulvany’s portrayal of Charlie’s mother is
very much a character in her own right, no matter how much Silvey tries to
rectify this in his novel. There’s a fierceness, a weariness, and a misplaced
gentleness to Mulvany’s performance of Mrs Bucktin that contrasts with her
(ever-so-close-to-scene-stealing) performance as the school bully and cricket
captain Warwick Trent. Steve
Rodgers brings a quiet warmth and dignity to Mr Bucktin, and a poignant
burning need to tell the truth in his ‘Mad’ Jack Lionel; if you follow the analogy of Jasper Jones being an Australian To Kill A Mockingbird, then Rodgers
effectively plays Atticus Finch and Boo Radley, yet he steers away from the
temptation to play them as caricatures, and imbues them with a touching and
moving realness, a humanity which shines, as it does with every other character
on the Belvoir stage in this play.
Under Anne-Louise
Sarks’ direction, Mulvany’s script shines. There’s a warmth here which creeps
under your skin and makes you smile, a softly-shaded nostalgia which makes you
yearn for your childhood, for those long carefree summer days, but the darkness
– which initially comes in the first five minutes of the show, and returns in
different guises throughout – does not dampen it, merely makes the lightness
stronger, keener, more necessary. And even though the darkness – and the very
visceral impact of it – is shocking at first, especially being so very early on
in the piece, Silvey-via-Mulvany – alongside Sarks – use it to their benefit,
and create a powerful, incredibly moving, and particularly strong show which
seems to reset the clock on what Belvoir can do, or at least what this
incarnation of Belvoir is capable of.
While part of
Mulvany’s theatrical conceit – and indeed, Sarks’ staging amplifies this – is
for Charlie to step outside of the narrative for a moment to talk directly to
the audience, a device we’ve seen quite frequently over the past couple of
years in Sydney, here you don’t really mind when it’s Conroy’s Charlie doing
so, because his earnestness draws us further in to the story, makes us allies
in his search for the truth, make us all a part of the story, a witness to the
racism, the violence, and the darkness which we still face in our lives today.
What Mulvany has done in her adaptation is to expand upon the relationships
between characters, expand the female characters’ function in the story, as
well as enhance the ever-present search for the missing girl, and the
ramifications of Charlie and Jasper’s actions at the outset of the story. While
Silvey creates the world of the township of Corrigan in all its detail, and
gives us some of the most enjoyable cricket scenes ever committed to paper, as
well as several scenes beautiful enough to earn the novel “sentimental-classic status”
(and don’t worry, they’re all here too), Mulvany fillets, reshapes, expands,
contracts, and reworks Silvey’s story to suit the theatrical space, to suit the
requirements of theatrical storytelling, yet never loses for one moment the
incredible generosity of spirit or bigness of heart that every reader falls in
love with.
If there is one
quibble to Sarks’ staging which hampers this conceit, it’s that some subsequent
moments are blocked in a way that leaves the centre of the space empty:
characters interact on the far edges of the stage (there is only one instance
in which this works truly effectively); characters stand with their back to the
audience for too long; the use of the stairs – while, for the most part, is
well-handled and suitably inclusive of the audience – occasionally serves to
isolate sections of the audience from the clarity of the story-telling.
Quibbles aside,
there is enough heart in this play to last you a year, and it will be a rare
treat indeed to see another dose of heart and compassion this beautiful in
2016. Indeed, this is where Silvey-via-Mulvany-and-Sarks’ Jasper Jones seems to serve as an overture for Belvoir 2016 and
Eamon Flack’s artistic directorship in a larger sense. “[This season is] about
how we live together,” Flack
says in the season book. “Family is a big theme, so too is society… There
are plays from the past, plays from now, plays from now about the past. There
are plays from here and plays from other countries. There are angry plays,
political plays, celebrations. There are splendid big acts of community, and
solo feats of daring. There are comedies, romances, fables, epics, whodunnits.
There are lonely tales, vast canvases, humble undertakings, foolhardy
undertakings… All
must be included, all must be spoken for, and spoken for brilliantly, with the
full force of human impressiveness.”
In this respect,
Flack and his fellow theatre-makers perfectly capture the sentiment behind
Jasper Jones’ lake-side plea to Charlie: “You gotta get brave.” As a maxim to
live by, it’s among the better ones; as a way to encapsulate the year ahead of
theatre-making, it certainly bodes very well indeed.
Here’s to a
munificent 2016.
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