Who's Afraid of the Working Class?
Written by Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Christos Tsiolkas and Melissa Reeves
Performed by Melbourne Workers Theatre, featuring David Adamson, Daniella Farinacci, Eugenia Fragos, Bruce Morgan, Glenn Shea and Maria Theodorakis
Music by Irene Vela
Directed by Julian Meyrick
Victorian Trades Hall, Melbourne, until May 23.
Review by Bronwen Beechey
Melbourne Workers Theatre's latest production looks at what is becoming of the working class, or at least the growing proportion of it that is no longer working. Four well-known writers have contributed four interlocking stories that bring to stark and often harrowing life the effects on ordinary people of unemployment, job insecurity, family breakdown, racism and sexual abuse.
Novelist Christos Tsiolkas' (Loaded) first performance piece, Suit, features characters who react to their oppression by lashing out at others.
A teenage boy describes his admiration for (and sexual fantasies about) Jeff Kennett, who he sees as a figure of strength and power, unlike his own father, whose life has been destroyed by Kennett's policies. A Koori who has managed to "make it" in the white business world uses his power and money to humiliate and abuse a white prostitute; he is in turn subjected to racial abuse by a customer of his company.
Money, by Patricia Cornelius, shows a family that is coming apart under the pressure of poverty — the mother desperately trying to hang on to the home that represents security, the unemployed father angry and resentful, the son (the teenage boy of Suit) alienated and sullen. Each member of the family resorts to lies and secrecy in an attempt to get money, with disastrous results.
In Melissa Reeves' Dreamtown, two young Greek-Australian women from a working-class suburb go on a shoplifting spree disguised as private schoolgirls in uniforms made by one girl's outworker mother.
Caught by the police, they find that their real crime is not so much shoplifting but daring to step out of their class. Their surface toughness dissipates to reveal their vulnerability to a bullying policeman determined to remind them of their place.
Trash, by Andrew Bovell, is perhaps the most affecting of the four plays. A brother and sister, escaping a background of poverty and abuse, spend a cold night on the streets dreaming of a "normal" life. Their mother's monologue reveals the tragic figure of a woman who loves her kids, but whose own history of abusive relationships makes her incapable of protecting them.
While the protagonists of Who's Afraid of the Working Class? are damaged and often unattractive, they are not victims. They are very real people struggling to cope with unreal pressures. And, as the final monologue by the neglected and abused mother of Money shows, human solidarity and warmth can still exist in the most unlikely places.
Who's Afraid of the Working Class? is a triumph of collaborative writing in which the four stories weave together almost seamlessly, and issues are raised subtly and effectively.
The performances are uniformly powerful and convincing. This is provocative, sometimes funny, sometimes uncomfortable theatre that stays with you long after the performance is over, and will perhaps convince some of the importance of struggling for a society in which working people don't pay such a high price for survival.
[Join Green Left Weekly supporters for a performance of Who's Afraid of the Working Class? on Monday, May 18, 7.30pm at the Victorian Trades Hall. Tickets $15/$8. For tickets or info phone (03) 9329 1320.]