Plays Philip performed in Australia in the 80's


Picture of Philip A Hard God

State Theatre Company of South Australia February 1981
Written by Peter Kenna
Directed by Nick Enright

Cast:


Synopsis:

Peter Kenna completed A Hard God in 1973 and was the first play of the trilogy The Cassidy Album (comprising A Hard God, Furtive Love and An Eager Hope).

A Hard God is a dramatic account of a brief period in the lives of the Cassidy family. The action of the play takes place in the living rooms of the Cassidy home in the western suburbs of Sydney, and in various locations around the area, as well as at Woy Woy, New South Wales. The time is 1946, and the play is structured in two strands.

The major strand deals with the marriage relationship of Dan and Aggie Cassidy, and with Dan's two brothers, Martin and Paddy, and their wives. The minor strand concerns the relationship between Joe Cassidy, Dan and Aggie's son, and Jack Shannon, a boy of his own age whom he meets at the Catholic Youth Organisation. The basic and thematic relationships in the play, however, are those between the characters and their 'hard' God, and it is this theme which links the two strands.

A Hard God is in the vanguard of works by Australian writers who have come to look critically at the precepts of a Catholic education and upbringing, and at the human agony often exacted in the active practice of the faith. These issues burden and comfort nearly all the characters in Kenna's play. To the characters, with the exception of Monica, religion is at best a mixed blessing. Dan and his brothers extol the value and comfort of their religion as a matter of form This mutual self-assurance has a hollow echo in the wider perspective of the play as a whole.

It is Dan's faith, which sustains him and in which makes Dan the refuge and comfort for his shiftless brothers, and his home a haven in their lives as their own families disintegrate. It is the stability of Dan's faith that permits Aggie to build her faith on him, still practising her religion, but regarding it in a detached, highly practical manner. The play abounds in Aggie's off-hand gibes at Monica's fanatical practice of her faith.

Through their unsatisfactory marriages, Paddy and Martin have become victims of a continuing, spiritual drought and the recollection of the past is used by both men as a refuge from this. Aggie's memories of the Depression years, however, are not as rosy as those enjoyed by her brothers-in-law. A tense scene develops, and Dan is mediator as his brothers quarrel. Sophie pays a traumatic offstage visit to the house, and the brothers are reconciled. Martin, the most meditative of the play's characters, proffers the view that their problems are concerned with the passage of time.

The second strand, which involves Joe Cassidy and Jack Shannon, explores the problems of reconciling the demands of religion with the natural impulses of life, compounded by the problems of dealing with a 'hard' God. The boys seem dislocated. Joe, it appears, is estranged from any close family life, and has turned to the Catholic Youth Organisation as a preferable substitute for lonely nights spent in picture theatres. Joe makes the first advances of friendship to Jack Shannon. Later Joe is genuinely embarrassed and confused by the physical advances, which Jack makes towards him. The holiday at Woy Woy, marks the turning point in their relationship. Joe sees no harm in the closeness that has developed between them, but Jack undergoes a mounting sense of guilt. He has awakened Joe's latent sexuality, and is alarmed by the emotions, which have been aroused within himself, and by the apparent depth of Joe's affection for him. To Joe, for whom the deepening relationship has meant security and affection without guilt, his inability to reconcile the demands of his faith and his need to give and to receive love begin to confound him.

In their final meeting, which takes place on Jack's initiative, Jack is calm and serene, clearly absolved of the guilt, which he has formally revealed both physically and emotionally. Joe's desperate pleas for Jack to stay amount to more than mere moral blackmail. They constitute a deep rejection of the demands of the faith, which has ultimately proven to be an inadequate refuge for the lonely, alienated boy.

The final scene of the play, presents a mother and a son unaware of the deep sense of loss, isolation and incomprehension being suffered by the other. Both turn to some immediate form of numbing escape (for Aggie, the wireless; for Joe, the defeating return to the pictures), and for both the moral sustenance of their faith seems to prove inadequate. Joe refuses to accept the verdict of the Church on the love he has felt for Jack, and is alienated from his religion. Aggie comprehends that she is to lose the Dan who has been her religion, and her attempt to pray direct to God is tentative and faltering. She refuses to accept this latest cruel blow countenanced by her hard God.

The play offers no solution to the universal dilemma with which it has been concerned, and the profundity of Aggie Cassidy's sense of loss is poignantly communicated in the play's closing moments when the stage fades into darkness and she is left there utterly alone.


Cast in rehersal pic.
No End of Blame

State Theatre Company of South Australia November 1981

Written by Howard Barker

Cast included:

Philip Quast, Heather Mitchell, Deborah Kennedy, Peter Crosstey, Robert Grubb, John Saunders, , Geoffrey Rush and Jeffrey Booth

Synopsis:

British playwright Howard Barker wrote 'No End of Blame' in 1980. It takes a hard look at nothing less than the meaning of art, faith and freedom of expression, as well as fascism, communism, socialism, capitalism. It also asks the question: Could the search for the true and just path in the 20th century lead anywhere other than a madhouse?

'No End of Blame' spans the years 1918 to 1973, and moves from a World War I battle and post-war Budapest, to Moscow in the 1920s and '30s and England from the 1940s on. It focuses primarily on the life of a Hungarian-born political cartoonist, Bela Veracek a mass of contradictions driven by crazy idealism and unrestrained egotism.

Veracek's character was forged in the charnel house of war. When we first see him, he is about to rape a peasant woman and is only stopped by his friend, Grigor Gabor, a passive, saintly 'pure artist.' Though trained as a painter, Veracek decides to become a cartoonist. "Give me ink, which dries quick, speaks quick, hurts," he says.

Expelled from the Institute of Fine Arts in Budapest, Veracek heads for Moscow, along with Grigor and the woman they both love. He expects to find a healthy respect for artists in Lenin's new society, but instead he is subjected to a stifling form of self-censorship and slave to doctrine. So it's on to England during World War II, where he quickly learns that money and class are all, and being a foreigner makes you suspect.

It's not just a matter of wartime unity either, but of profit. In the 1970s, the Fleet Street press barons jettison dark political satire in favour of light sexual humour on their cartoon pages. The esteemed Veracek, now in his 70s, is sacked. And he is distraught suddenly unsure of the motives that have driven his tumultuous life. His friend Grigor is no better off. In a bizarre and feverish climactic scene in a mental hospital, the two men drive each other even more mad than they already are.


Article on No End of Blame:

No show causes no end of worry

By Lance Campbell The Advertiser 4 November 1981

Actors rarely make public statements about their product-partly because they are not often asked, and partly because they prefer to get on with the job. They make plenty in private but usually what they want to say is in the play.

However, the failure of Howard Barker's No End of Blame at the Playhouse to attract enough punters to justify performances on Monday night and last night was the signal for the greasepaint to come off and the lines to spring from the heart. Eight members of the cast were prepared to go in to bat - fervently - for the cause of their State Theatre Company and their production, which one described to murmured assent as a piece of "considerable merit" and along with The Revenger's Tragedy, "(State's) best show of the year."

Giving rightfully committed, sincere actors the opportunity to explain their plight is a little like allowing Hitler to list only the good points of the Third Reich, but the situation is disturbing enough to allow it, because on Monday night a mere 30 South Australians thought No End of Blame was worth a look in the 600-seat auditorium. Last night only 38 were prepared to part with their money. They didn't go, of course, because STC's management ruled that that was spreading the jam a little to thinly. Nothing like this has happened before to the State's premier performing arts company. It was serious enough to move the Minister of Arts, Mr Hill, to register his concern at the cancellations. Mr Hill announced he would investigate ways of promoting future State Theatre Company productions.

To Heather Mitchell, Deborah Kennedy, Peter Crosstey, Robert Grubb, John Saunders, Philip Quast, Geoffrey Rush and Jeffrey Booth it was a situation that could have been demoralizing were it not for their confidence in their own work. "We would play to an empty house. We believe in it," said Crossley. "The irony is that the show is extremely good," said Rush. "We wouldn't feel bad about playing to a small house. We've already found a greater number of people than normal saying 'thank you' for the performance."

Philip Quast said "I think an audience is more likely to be intimidated by the small numbers than we are. Directors from Sydney have been coming over to see the shows. It is one of the most exciting seasons for a long time." Kennedy said "Thirty actors can't be wrong.

Right or wrong, exciting or not, to cancel a performance is a body blow to company prestige and a danger to morale. No End of Blame is a fittingly poignant title. To the actors the blame rests on several areas. Some are strident about "media erosion" of State's reputation, accusing the critics of personal preferences, and harking back to previous regimes. "What has a retrospective point of view got to do with what is going on this season?" asks Quast.

Said John Saunders "The standard of this play proves that the decline in audiences is not indicative of a corresponding decline in artistic standards."

Said Crossley "People do not have the money to throw around that they had 12 months or two years ago. There is so much competition for the arts dollar in Adelaide, and this series of plays has coincided with this depression."

All of the cast has remained cheerful and confident of state's future during the setbacks. But an actor out of work, even for a night or two, is rarely a contented soul. Robert Grubb feels "out of phase," Philip Quast "totally lost". To Deborah Kennedy, she has been "horribly redundant." "I've got so much to say through the author that is so flipping relevant, and not the chance to say it!" she added.


Picture of Philip as Jonah
Song of the Seals

Come out '83 Playhouse Theatre, Adelaide May 1983
Written by by Dorothy Hewitt

Synopsis:

Song of the Seals is the story of an orphan called Willow who makes her home near the selchies, half human, half seal, like people, who are fighting to save Mystery Bay from Marlin Prawn and his 'One Big Deal'.

Philip played the part of Jonah Fyshe a leopard seal


Review of Song of the Seals

by Pamela Harris - The Australian 10 May 1983

To be orphaned is tragic. But to discover that Grandma, your only surviving relative, is in fact a seal, should send a grieving child into severe shock. Fortunately for Willow Ogilvie, she exists in a fantasy .world created by Dorothy Hewitt for South Australia's biennial Come Out '83 celebration of the arts for children.

Song of the Seals describes a strange community of folk living somewhere in Australia called Mystery Bay. Their secret is that they are Selchies half seal and half human. And as Willow Ogilvie discovers when she arrives there to live, they are really very nice.

But they have problems. Whereas seals are inherently good, man is evil and bent on the destruction, not only of seals, but of every aspect of the environment.

Hewitt is not wrong in this assertion. But presenting the plight of the seal and the environmentalists' cause to today's school children is preaching to the yawningly converted who now concern themselves with the ethics of nuclear arms and energy. The audience response was decidedly lacklustre. Hewitt's writing is often lyrical, her theme of animal transfiguration is interesting and the story line has goodies, baddies, love, the misunderstood all the elements of a good, fireside yarn for 10 year olds. And indeed, the 10 year olds were uncritical. So were the 4 year olds. But the 11-pluses were ambivalent in their response, as was this critic.

The consensus of opinion from the first-night post-mortem debate is that the play should suffer some humane culling, There are too many long songs and to many episodes of the finale. There should be more levity and fewer moral issues. The characters themselves are interesting, if a little confusing at first. Each protagonist is stereotyped in period costume.

Willow Ogilvie is dressed as a 1983 teenager and her grandmother, Myrna Moonlight, wears a long, starched pinafore (to hide the seal beneath suspects Willow). Miss Prissy Prynn, the schoolteacher, is prim 1940s to the toes, while the villain of the piece, Marlin Prawn the developer, is a 50s spiv. Captain Kydd is an old salt with a wooden leg and Honeyman, a friendly hippie from the hills, is pure alternative'70s.

Were we to make moral assumptions on these appearances? Certainly the attitudes of the characters infers that we should. Among the cast, Philip Quast as Jonah Fyshe a leopard seal from Antarctica who has lost his skin and is tormented to be beached, excels in all - song, dance, pathos and ecstacy.

Caroline Baker as Grandma Moonlight possesses a beautiful voice and a fair semblance of a Scottish West Coast accent. As Captain Jacob Kydd, Chris Tugwell exhibits truly heroic enduranceóor perhaps he really has a wooden leg.

But it is Nigel Levings with his consummate mastery of lighting who takes the honors. The theatre technicians are a poorly recognised elite. Levings, who can make a midnight seascape shimmer in moonlight or can filter the most beautiful of sunrises, is surely a star in his own right.



Carmen Another Perspective

Melbourne Theatre Company , Melbourne April 1983

Carmen's musical highs save the day

Review by Dennis Davidson, The Australian 19 April 1984

The French seem obsessed with the femme fatale who captures the heart of a naive young man. This simple plot served Manon Lescaut and The Lady of the Camellias, as well as Carmen, which began as a short tale by Merimee and has been transformed into an opera, several plays, films and ballets.

It is rather daring of Jeannie Lewis and her collaborators to present "another perspective", as the play's subtitle claims. What they have done is concentrate on the basic story of the infatuated soldier and the promiscuous gypsy dancer who is finally killed by her jealous lover, The program quotes Bruce Myles' desire to explore the themes of fate and freedom of choice, but the production itself hardly justifies these grandiose aims.

Musically the production was very exciting, thanks to musical director Robert Gavin, Peter Gavin on keyboards, and Peter Farmer, percussion. The wellknown Bizet tunes were interestingly manipulated, but Jeannie Lewis should have been allowed to display more of her great talent for such interpretative variations.

If the music mime and setting were highly successful the same cannot be said for the dialogue or the acting. Philip Quast, in his odd crumpled uniform, had the task of making obsessive love and jealousy plausible. He was not helped by the utterly banal soap opera dialogue, and his struggle to stifle Carmen's singing bordered on the ludicrous.

Jeannie Lewis is a wonderful singer, and she can dance, but as an actress she is not sufficiently relaxed to play the seductress, and not intense enough to portray the fierce freedom-loving gypsy.

It is a pity there were these defects of dialogue and acting because Philip Quast has a splendid voice, and Jeannie Lewis's singing is always memorable.


Picture of Philip as Henry
The Marriage

Thalia Theatre Company, Adelaide, March 1986

Written by Polish playwright Witold Gombrowicz's in 1947
Directed by Bogdan Koca

The Marriage examines the use of religion and ritual to maintain power. The play concerns a soldier returning home from WWII to family conflict and a distorted and dreamlike Poland

Philip played the part of Henry


Reviews of The Marriage and Hamlet


Hamlet and The Marriage

Thalia Theatre Company, The Space Until March 15
Both plays performed together on next two Saturdays
Review by Lance Campbell The Advertiser 5 March 1986

"Can anything be known for certain?" asks Johnny, Horatio to Henry's Hamlet in Witold Gombrowicz's The Marriage.

"To be or not to be," Ophelia, Molly in The Marriage, reads to Hamlet in William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Johnny is Hamlet in Hamlet.

Apparently it was meant not to be so. Hamlet was supposed to be Horatio in Hamlet. And Horatio to be Hamlet. Johnny was to be Bishop Pandulf in The Marriage, and Bishop Pandulf to be Johnny.

But something changed between the program and the performance, and those players of parts we see before us in the Thalia Theatre Company's ambitious cross-cultural double-bill will remain, provided Polish director Bogdan Koca doesn't do a Hamlet and change his mind.

Anyway, there is already enough in these joint offerings to keep Adelaide audiences guessing and second-guessing well past the end of the Festival. Clearly, Thalia was contrived to be the real theatrical stretcher of the season, pitting on consecutive nights what many believe to be the greatest tragedy ever written against an obscure but powerful Polish play which playwright Gombrowicz has cheerfully admitted borrows from Hamlet, and parodies it.

The parallels are sustained throughout, and in an absurdist style unfamiliar here that as good as demands that Hamlet comes off second-best. Shakespeare's play closes with war imminent and the nightmare ending, Gombrowicz's starts with peace on the way, and the nightmare just beginning. The settings are six years apart 1939 to 1946.

Both heroes, Hamlet (Michael Gow) and Henry (Philip Quast) are meant to reflect the agony of the Polish experience - the centuries-long confusion and uncertainty of a people which has changed little since Shakespeare wrote about a human condition 380 years ago and since Gombrowicz tried his hand while marooned in Argentina during World War II.

Koca has succeeded admirably in sustaining this confusion for the entire five-hour stretch. Quast bursts into truncated Hamlet, even Fortinbras, in The Marriage, and his is a performance that grows in intensity, so that out of the director's determination to annoy and irritate the audience comes a strong portrait of man riddled with the pain of doubt and jealousy, hoping against hope that it is all just a dream.

Picture of Philip as Henry

Perhaps he is Poland itself a Poland that won't change but periodically has to anaesthesise itself simply to keep going. This version of Hamlet alleges - as all the others do - that it illuminates the important themes, so often hidden behind tradition, by presenting it in a pragmatic, contemporary form.

Nonsense. If you can believe it is revelationary to observe a Hamlet who looks, and sometimes behaves, like Groucho Marx in pursuit of Margaret Dumont over yet another sofa and an Ophelia who, pretty face apart, resembles a footballer in a tutu - only not as articulate - then you have your Hamlet.

However, I doubt there would be many of you. Both Gow and Gosia Dobrowolska as Ophelia are compromised by this absurdist approach, and the play can't take it in the end. For example, during the evening, we have The Mousetrap (before it was written), The Charge of the Light Brigade and a '20s silent Swedish film of the duel scene, which is more bizarre than anything even Koca could conjure up.

Ophelia is hard enough to get right at any time, but this one is way off the stage, down with the pixies who must be getting trampled to death every second night. Gow works hard, and succeeds in the soliloquies, but far better is his intelligent Johnny in The Marriage. There is nothing wrong with tampering with Hamlet. Because it is so rich, it is there for everybody to explore, whether Shakespeare intended it or not, and Koca has concocted some fascinating devicesóenough to make it worth seeing for its novelty value alone.

But in truth it is little more than a set-up job, a vehicle to get The Marriage rolling, and here the whole exercise becomes worth the effort. Koca is unsparing of his audience and the players, who, freed of the limitations of Hamlet, let loose with uniformly convincing performances, although the venerable Robin Ramsay shouted so long and loud in both plays that he made at least one set of teeth hurt.

Henry says it gets sillier by the minute and it does. The Marriage is the old treadmill dream that everyone who has slept fears going nowhere but always leaving an unnerving impression. Poland again, and Hamlet parodied and pointed. Both productions are in stark black-and-white, very middle European and very challenging. They have their place in a Festival, and go see them by all means. But be warned. It is likely you will feel better after them than you will during them - like you do when you wake from the treadmill dream.


The Marriage a 'poor parody'

The News 6 March 1986

Thalia Theatre Company should divorce Hamlet from The Marriage for the remainder of the Adelaide Festival season. The Wedding is an arrogant, indulgent piece of theatre that fails to stimulate, amuse or challenge the intellect of an audience.

Although well acted with effective stage craft the arty production fails to shadow or parody Hamlet as promised.

Director Bogdan Koca hopes 'to close the artificial gap between European culture, often perceived as intellectually sophisticated, visually brilliant, internationalist - and Australian culture, often denigrated as rough and ready, anti-intellectual and parochial." Well, he fancied.

Instead, he insults Shakespeare and denigrates Witold Gombrowicz's play.

Philip Quast, the soldier returning from the war to find his girlfriend raped, has a mammoth task of creating sense from impressionistic fantasy. His one singing part shows wonderful talent.

Gosia Dobrowoiska is Ophelia in Hamlet and Ophelia in The Marriage.



Grateful thanks to Meg and Elizabeth for their assistance in finding some of this material.


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