Belonging by John McCallum

Author:John McCallum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Currency Press
Published: 2014-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Nick Enright

Until his early death in 2003 at the age of 52, Nick Enright was one of the most prolific and wide-ranging playwrights of the previous twenty years, turning out, in addition to comedies and dramas, an extraordinary succession of musicals (The Venetian Twins, Variations, Summer Rain, Miracle City, Mary Bryant and, most successfully, The Boy From Oz), youth and community plays (A Property of the Clan, Spurboard) and large works, written for drama schools, that enabled him to tell grander and more elaborate stories, particularly after the contraction of the subsidised professional theatres in the 1980s.7

One of the most successful of these large-scale works was Country Music, produced in 2002 as a NIDA graduation show to open their new lyric theatre on Anzac Parade in Sydney. This country-town comedydrama, which takes up many of the traditions discussed in earlier chapters, tells a story spanning many generations that is haunted by the ghosts of the dispossessed. Literally lying about the stage are the bones of children lost in the bush, dug up by a dog who is also the play’s narrator. It celebrates country-town life, with the kids of the town, the local cop, the respectable shopkeepers, the pastoralists in the big house, and the drifters, immigrants and fringe-dwellers who walk the streets, all made subjects of a case-study for the idea of a wider Australian or global community.

But it is also a twenty-first-century work. There is a refugee detention centre just outside the town; and the characters include an escaped detainee who is outraged by behaviour at an ocker barbecue; a teacher who discovers his aboriginality; and a young woman who suddenly discovers her lesbian sexuality and flees to the city. Left unrevised when Enright died, this magnificently sprawling work has a broad scope, an interest in community and topical social issues, a simple humanity and wry humour that make it a remarkably appropriate culmination of his career.

During the 1980s Enright seemed to be an excellent genre writer with a great deal to express, but without a personal point of view. On the Wallaby (1980) is a cheerful ballad-opera about the struggles of the O’Brien family, wharfies in Port Adelaide during the Depression. Like many plays of the New Wave, it uses the past, in this case in music, but it is more nostalgic. Daylight Saving (1989), a romantic comedy about life in urbane Sydney in the 1980s, was an early success. Enright was also one of Australia’s first major translators of the classic repertoire, including a successful version of Molière’s Don Juan in 1984.

He collaborated with Terence Clarke, and later with David King and Max Lambert, on a series of musicals that culminated in the hit The Boy from Oz in 1998, about the life and music of the singer Peter Allen. With Clarke he wrote The Venetian Twins (1979), based on Goldoni’s eighteenth-century comedy; and Summer Rain (1983), a musical tribute to the old travelling tent shows. Summer Rain focuses on a troupe on its last legs, stranded in the dry western plains of eastern Australia.

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