The darkness of a musician's downfall
Complicity
By Timothy Daly
Marian Street Theatre, Sydney
Until February 22
Review by Brendan Doyle
This well-constructed play, given a fine production by director John Krummel, tells the story of Eugene Goossens, a musician of great talent, whose life and career were destroyed after Australian customs officers found pornographic materials in his luggage in 1956.
Beyond the downfall of Goossens, the composer and conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Complicity evokes Australian society in the 1950s, ruled by Menzies, with its anticommunist paranoia, repression, censorship and mean-spiritedness. It also portrays the reaction against that, as creative individuals like Goossens tried to explore other worlds.
Timothy Daly, whose previous big success was Kafka Dances, has constructed his play like a detective story, in which we feel the net gradually closing in on the central figure, who is finally overcome by superior forces.
Daly, who also has a strong musical background, has deftly woven his various themes in a symphonic fashion, giving the whole play a rich, satisfying texture.
The play opens with a mysterious meeting, setting the tone of the thriller about to unfold. Goossens (David Downer) is standing against a troubled sky on a Sydney headland, waiting for a ship to come into the harbour.
A man in a bowler hat steps up behind him, makes conversation, then drops some names and addresses that Goossens clearly would rather be kept secret. Who is this man with a German accent, and how did he know of Goossens's penchant for black magic and pornography?
Then we're in a comfortable Wahroonga flat, where Eugene's US wife Marjorie complains about not seeing enough of her busy husband, who dreams of establishing an opera house on Bennelong Point as a permanent home for the SSO.
The action soon moves to the totally contrasting flat of Rosaleen Norton (Angela Punch McGregor), "the witch of Kings Cross" and her partner the poet Gavin Greenlees, where Goossens is now spending more and more time in occult rituals organised by Rosaleen.
The artist in Goossens goes in search of what he calls "the Darkness". But these activities do not go unnoticed. Detective Sergeant McManus drops in to search for illicit materials and finds Goossens there.
Goossens tells his best friend Tom, big shot at the ABC, which employs Goossens in the orchestra, and Tom warns him to be careful, that the world is dangerous, that the authorities will do anything to destroy someone who transgresses the rules. And that he has enemies.
In a scary conclusion to act one, Goossens has just finished conducting the premiere of his new work Apocalypse when we see the detective standing in the audience, clapping slowly with a look of mockery on his face.
Act two opens at Sydney airport Customs, where McManus has been waiting for Goossens to arrive from London. The cop intimidates Goossens into opening his suitcase for inspection, and finds more than a thousand photos of the pornographic and occult variety, enough to ensure big trouble for the respected conductor. He is fined £100 for the offence, and his career is in tatters.
The rest of the play tells of the musician's irresistible downfall. His wife dumps him, as do the ABC, the NSW Conservatorium of Music, where he was director, and the rest of the establishment, who had previously praised him as a cultural hero. In the final scene, he leaves Australia in disgrace, never to return.
In an author's note, Daly says that Goossens is "a tragic figure in a peculiarly Australian landscape ... a place where memory and dreams collide violently with a harsh reality". The semi-surrealistic set by Deirdre Burges certainly evokes this menacing landscape, both the physical and the social.
This important play is a plea for tolerance and freedom, as well as a denunciation of all those who conspired to destroy one of society's true creative geniuses: hence the title Complicity. Who knows what Goossens could have gone on to achieve had he been allowed the freedom to continue exploring what he called "the Darkness"?