The Audition

Life as an audition.  Please hire me, please give me the role, please like me, please accept me, please see me as I am, please acknowledge my experience, please allow me to enter your country, please recognise me as a genuine refugee… 

Irine Vela’s moody, funny, bitterly ironic production is written by three of the Melbourne Worker’s Theatre writers, who gave us Anthem, plus three talented and insightful newcomers.  In a series of pieces that flow convincingly one into another, characters offer themselves at ‘audition’ only to find that what is genuine is rejected and what is acceptable is predetermined by prejudice or cliché.  Theatrical auditions segue into a Border Force interview, or a plea from an inmate slowly dying in one of our concentration camps for ‘illegals’.

In the opening salvo, Mary Sitarenos auditions for the role of Olive in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.  Ms Sitarenos, black haired, black eyed, is striking and of enormous presence: she is riveting.  Anyone who knows the Doll can see that she would be a wonderful but different Olive and lift the old warhorse into another sphere.  But no: she won’t get the part; she doesn’t fit; she’s ‘not white’. 

Later, a young woman (Sahra Davoudi), clearly a refugee who has witnessed horrors, wrestles with a perhaps well-meaning but impotent immigration officer (Peter Paltos) – and later still she auditions for a production of The Trojan Women with a bullying and condescending director (Mr Paltos again).  Ms Davoudi, here and in other segments, proves herself a quite astonishing talent: her pointed comic timing combines with an ability to convey depths of pain – to which her interlocuters are oblivious.  And she is one of the writers here too.  Mr Paltos, meanwhile, can touch us as a refugee, but also impersonate the impervious official or ‘artistic’ Aussie so that we see both from the point of view of those desperate to break through.

Another of the writers, Milad Norouzi, sings ‘Goodbye’, composed by himself and accompanied by himself on guitar.  In an item called ‘Beautiful Jail’, he stands in dim light upstage, a thin, isolated and lonely figure, occasionally bouncing or tossing a basketball – and never has a mere basketball been more poignant and suggested more of helpless sadness.      

This series of ostensibly separate ‘items’ by the different writers meld into one another, united powerfully and clearly by the theme of ‘audition’ and by the Kanun music and improvisations on Iranian classical music from Vahideh Eisaei.  Irine Vela is more than a great talent; she has a big heart.  Her casting, direction and dramaturgy (the last together with Maryanne Lynch) and this diverse, talented and maybe unjustly hidden cast make for a tight, coherent, integrated whole.  The humour is double edged, the emotions piercing.  This is political theatre that rises far above agit-prop.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Darren Gill (C) Outer Urban Projects