Dreamers

Anna - Helen Morse – thin as a rail and as beautiful as ever - keeps herself to herself.  She’s a 60-something widow, a piece worker in the clothing trade, lives alone, a lapsed Christian, reads and dreams, and has a married 20-something daughter who exploits her.  Majid is a 20-something immigrant, homesick, isolated, looking for work – menial or otherwise.  He lives in a ratty boarding house and washes and prays in his room.  A practicing Muslim, he too reads and dreams and carries his native land and it’s stories in his heart. 

Two lonely, yearning people who fall in love – and find that their love threatens, ‘disgusts’ and is totally unacceptable to the angry and fragmenting community that surrounds them.  Late in the play – and these are brilliant directorial touches – the lovers’ antagonists appear to be right inside Anna’s flat and surrounding and following on the street – a perfect manifestation of how persecution feels.  You can shut the door, you can run, but they are there, all the time.

For once almost all of the large fortyfivedownstairs space becomes the stage for this production.  Director Ariette Taylor and designer Adrienne Chisholm boldly and imaginatively create, by suggestion and poignant detail, Anna’s tiny flat, Majid’s boarding house room, a construction site, a pub, a café, a bus stop and the street.  Andy Turner’s lighting and Sam Bolton’s sound design strengthen the illusion.  There’s a community here – the micro intended, I assume, to represent the macro.  It’s established straight off by a player piano centre stage thumping out old favourites with the locals singing along.  The bonhomie, however, is shallow, a veneer.  The nostalgia is fake, a memory of a time that never existed - before ‘they’ came.  And the bonhomie will be so easily disrupted, releasing darker, uglier forces.  It’s currently a most recognisable phenomenon: the easy-going ‘live and let live’ just needs a small touch of the alien right there in your own street – and when the ‘nigger’ (I’m quoting the text) is shagging one of ours…

Ms Morse gives Anna dignity, strength and a matter-of-fact tenderness.  It is not the first time that I have felt Ms Morse carrying, even redeeming, the show.  Yomal Rajasinghe, as Majid, in his first professional role, has real presence: strong, handsome and able to imbue his character with layers of naiveté, bewilderment, sweetness and anger – while maintaining his otherness. 

The rest of the cast cannot be faulted, although Brigid Gallacher is rather underused (that is to say, underwritten) as Carole, Anna’s daughter.  She is the most one-dimensional of the characters and thus is likely to leave audiences incredulous at the play’s final moments.  Natasha Herbert is the local barmaid and good time gal.  She doesn’t back away from portraying with great conviction a slattern and vituperative nasty racist.  Nicholas Bell is the sour and defeated neighbour, endlessly sweeping the filth off his street.  Marco Chiappi, spitting bile in his rumbling bass voice, is a construction site foreman: the guy who’d like to be an alpha male, but isn’t and suspects he isn’t.  Paul English brings pathos to his disappointed, confused, half-heartedly racist Ticket Inspector.  And Jonathan Taylor as the café waiter is the little guy (once a hoofer maybe) who agrees with the big guys.

Dreamers was originally commissioned in 2009 by the Toulouse-based company Tabula Rasa as a contemporary response to the movies All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk 1955) and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Maria Fassbinder 1974).  In Sirk’s melodrama, a wealthy widow falls in love with her gardener, transgressing class boundaries and earning sharp and harsh ostracism.  Fassbinder’s far less glossy version has an elderly German woman marry a Moroccan immigrant – with rage and consternation the result.  Daniel Keene – appropriately for our times - leans toward the racial rather than the class divide.  He writes a very angry program note about the issue with clear reference to current asylum seeker (or ‘illegal maritime arrival’) policy.   

Anger in a good cause, however, or depiction of persecution doesn’t necessarily lead to a great play and without in any way questioning Mr Keene’s, Ms Taylor’s or the wonderful cast’s motives, Dreamers isn’t a totally satisfying play.  While the love story is poignant, it doesn’t quite convince as much more than a kind lady being hospitable.  Mr Keene also seems to have little new to say (no matter how well or forcefully he says it) about racism and racists.  His racists – the foreman, the barmaid, et al. – are all losers externalizing and displacing their defeats and fears onto The Other.  When polls suggest that 65% of Australians believe that we don’t treat asylum seekers harshly enough, we know that it’s bigger and more complicated than that.  

At the interval, an acquaintance remarked that the play seemed ‘very long and drawn out’ and that it had by then said all it had to say.  It was hard to disagree.  Ms Taylor breaks up the darkness and didacticism with flashes of physical humour and such things as a dance routine with wheelie bins, but these feel like arbitrary insertions.  To discuss the ending would involve giving it away, but suffice to say that the story stops rather than ends.  The racists have their say, Majid is beaten up and Anna begins to have doubts and… There is a moment of resolution, a ray of hope, but it does feel like a last minute tack-on.  Maybe it’s too much to ask for more, but although we have been moved, touched and frightened, although we have recoiled and been angered, the ending is ambiguous and we are – really – left hanging.  Perhaps that is intentional: there is no resolution and Mr Keene throws to us.  What are you going to do about this?

Michael Brindley  

Images: Yomal Rajasinghe, Helen Morse and Paul English; Jonathan Taylor, Natasha Herbert, Nicholas Bell, Paul English, Marco Chiappi and Brigid Gallacher; Jonathan Taylor, Natasha Herbert, Paul English, Helen Morse, Nicholas Bell and Brigid Gallacher, & Helen Morse and Yomal Rajasinghe. Photographer: Jeff Busby.