Norm and Ahmed

‘Got a light?’ says a man at the bus stop to another walking by. The two could not be more different: the smoker is brash, street-smart, a Sydney ‘local’; the other is well-spoken, intelligent, and from Pakistan.

Norm and Ahmed is a play written by Alex Buzo, and is a one-act dialogue between two people at a Sydney bus stop at midnight, some time in the late 1960s. The conversation is driven by Norm, questioning Ahmed as to what he’s doing in Australia, showing interest in his studies and his future, all the time assuring him that he’ll be made to feel welcome in this foreign land – providing he plays by the rules, which Norm is more than happy to explain to him. Ahmed is mostly passive – responding to Norm’s question, offering up opinions when he’s asked for them, then having to apologise for them when Norm reacts badly. It’s a fifty-year old study in racism embedded into the Aussie male psyche, directed by Bakehouse regular Joh Hartog (who himself moved from the Netherlands to Australia in the late 1960s). It’s depressing to see how little has changed.

Brendan Cooney brings his usual larrikin character to Norm, only this time without the laughs: he reveals a complicated man, in the shadow of his father killed in battle, traumatised by his own wartime experiences. His violent outbursts are immediately followed by remorse – and his sly interchanges with the nervous foreign student are all the more terrifying because you don’t know what’s coming next: Cooney knows how to tread the line between a man willing to share and one that lashes out, driven by his own insecurity.

Ahmed is played beautifully by CeeJay Singh: polite to his Australian host, but not without his own opinions: well considered and articulated, both of which unintentionally infuriate Cooney’s Norm. When the original question is revealed to be a ploy to draw him into conversation, Singh’s reaction is initially fear, but then he begins to relax into the knowledge that he’ll better Norm in any argument. Just as long as he doesn’t get physical. Singh’s characterisation is necessarily more subtle than Cooney’s, his physicality less ostentatious yet no less powerful.

Buzo’s play is more than the first few and infamous last two words, that saw actors arrested when performed fifty years ago. It remains confronting in its language and themes but there are dual stories of alienation: not just of Norm trying to tell Ahmed how to behave in a country that’s not his own, but also of Norm revealing that he’s just as alienated from his own community. Whether from the PTSD of war, or the constant change to which he struggles to adapt, he knows that he doesn’t ‘fit’ – and his angry responses are ugly in word and action.

It's a good production that sadly doesn’t seem to date – perhaps by exploring what hasn’t changed, and what has, we can begin to ensure this Norm is anything but.

Mark Wickett

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