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The Father We Loved on a Beach by the Sea
By Stephen Sewell
Directed by Mary-Anne Gifford
With Adrian Adam, Bridge Andrews, Stephen Barker, Hamish McDonald, Andrew Rodoreda, Gerard Sont and Julia Zemiro
New Theatre, Newtown (Sydney)
Thursday-Sunday until February 3
Reviewed by Allen Myers Father was Stephen Sewell's first feature play, produced 19 years ago in Brisbane. For this revival by the New Theatre, Sewell has moved the action forward to 1990 and rewritten what he now regards as "weaknesses" in the original version. Never having seen the original, I don't know whether Sewell is being unjust to his past, but this production is a real gem. The tightly knit plot is woven around the ties and hostilities within a single family: Joe (Andrew Rodoreda), Mary (Julia Zemiro), their sons Dan and Mikey (Adrian Adam and Gerard Sont) and Joe's brother Pat (Bridge Andrews). The central themes are the conflicting demands of social and personal relationships the possibilities of "little people" having any impact on what happens in their lives. Or, as Sewell puts it in his program notes, it is "a play about the impossibility of compromise and the disaster of its rejection". Dan, the family black sheep, is a suddenly ex-Communist as a result of his disillusion with the collapsed regimes in Eastern Europe. He returns to Australia for a confrontation with Mikey and, primarily through flashback, with Joe. More than that, the confrontation is with his own past, an attempt to decipher whether his years of political activity were something to be proud of or a ghastly mistake. Stephen Sewell never provides his characters with easy answers to the questions that torment them, which is one of the reasons his dramas are so taut and intriguing. The necessary comic relief comes not from unexpected plot twists but from the truth and humour of Sewell's dialogue. In Father, it may be that Sewell has even somewhat overloaded the dilemmas that Dan carries on his shoulders. He is driven to choose between starkly posed and equally undesirable alternatives: the crimes of Stalinism and the pettiness of absorption in family life, with its social pessimism and irresponsibility. The vast potential for progressive social struggles independent of Stalinism is brought in only near the end of the play, in a scene on Sydney's anti-airport noise campaign which I found slightly jarring. (But others I saw the play with found the scene appropriate and convincing.) Production and acting are top flight. Rodoreda has so mastered Joe that he plays a much older man without needing make-up to age him. Andrews is just right as his tipsy, ne'er-do-well brother. If soliloquies are not popular in modern theatre, it's mostly because few actors can carry them off well, even when, as in Sewell's case, they are well written. Adam handles Dan's soliloquy, like the whole part, flawlessly. The role of Mary, as the only woman in the play, is especially important and difficult, but Julia Zemiro more than rises to the occasion. The whole performance comes together in a way that happens only with excellent direction. Director Gifford has imparted a fine sense of timing to the production, so that her actors' silences often speak as loudly as their words.