Anthem

Twenty-one years after creating the landmark Who’s Afraid of the Working Class, four playwrights and a composer have come together again. The circumstances are different — they’re now firmly established as some of the country’s best writers and this time they’ve been commissioned by Melbourne’s Arts Centre rather than its Workers Theatre. The success of this play is also on a different level. While Anthem doesn’t carry the same sucker punch as their 1998 work, it offers an important chance to stop and think about ourselves and our divided society.

Like the original play, Anthem weaves together four stories about Australians who haven’t enjoyed the benefits of the country’s prosperity. It’s set largely on the suburban trains of Melbourne, where everyday people are forced to get up close and incredibly personal. A young mother struggling with almost everything in life hits out at passengers and a ticket inspector; a successful man returns home from France to see his less fortunate siblings; a couple who work at 7-11 and Chemist Warehouse confront the system that has trodden them down; and two women — a cleaner and her former employer — meet abrasively on a commute. These encounters are tough, each person combative as they face the other.

The four works by Bovell, Cornelius, Reeves and Tsiolkas are brought together dramatically with haunting violin and bass compositions by Vela. And the brilliant Ruci Kaisila belts out a number of anthems — including “Waltzing Matilda” and an incredibly ironic “I Still Call Australia Home” — as Charity, a busker who tells everyone on stage and off to “pay up, pay up”. It hits home.

Anthem is at its best when dramatising the ideas of class and difference rather than explicitly discussing them. The most devastating scene is of a young mother, struggling to get her five-year-old boy to his father’s on time, when she clashes with a ticket inspector on the train. The other passengers all get out their phones to film her as she breaks down.

The ensemble cast is universally wonderful. They all clearly identify with the stories they’re telling and, thanks to Susie Dee’s astute direction, bring out the best of them. Marg Horwell’s enormous set of train platforms and carriages creates its own drama as it transforms between scenes — the design is brilliant.

The grand nature of this — staged for the Arts Centre and Roslyn Packer Theatre rather than Melbourne’s Trades Hall— creates a different experience from Who’s Afraid of the Working Class. It’s epic rather than intimate — and that’s not always a good thing.

But as the play ends, we are left to ponder where Australia is now and if it’s really serving everyone it should. Anthem will hopefully make audiences think more sympathetically towards others and contemplate how we can be more inclusive. The five amazing writers capture our struggles in difficult times. It’s often bleak but somehow rousing too.

Peter Gotting

Photographer: Victor Frankovski