Our Australian Education

Today’s our last day in Australia. After spending Sunday and Monday at the beach (an overcrowded Bondi and a more relaxing Manley and Shelly, respectively), today we’re heading back to the Sydney fish market for oysters and prawns, we’re going to do some shopping and we’re going to finish the day with a play, Rabbit.

Theatre-wise, we’ve had a great run over the past month. We’ve managed to see three distinctly Australian plays, with Rabbit being our fourth. Taken together, they’ve given us an unorthodox education in what Australia’s all about.

Politics was covered by John Doyle’s The Pig Iron People (at the Sydney Opera House), a comedy set in 1997, the year John Howard, the conservative (down here, they’re called Liberals) who wrote all of Stephen Harper’s best lines, came to power. Alternately broadly funny and quite moving, it’s a thoughtful play about the fear of societal change represented by the election of Howard. Though some of Doyle’s “Old Australia” characters stray close to caricature, he never condescends to them. The Pig Iron People is an honest (and, most importantly, funny) attempt to understand a pivotal period in Australian history.

If you want to understand the role of sport – particularly cricket – in Australian life, you could do worse than the amazing Shane Warne: The Musical (the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne). Imagine if Wayne Gretzky were a charismatic, boozing, chain-smoking womanizer and you’ll have an idea of who Shane Warne is and his role in Australian society: Warne’s name comes up twice in a book I’m reading on recent Australian political history.

Now imagine that story live on stage, set to music. The songs are great, ranging in style from rock ballads, to electronica, to an off-colour tune Noel Coward would have been happy to claim as his own. While you won’t get all the jokes if you haven’t read the tabloid headlines (thanks to Natasha’s Uncle Valdy for filling us in), and while Natasha’s Uncle Bob still had to explain the rules of cricket to me, the story of a talented athlete undone by his own appetites and a public unable to separate what happens on the field and off is a universal story.

Oh, and Warnie attended opening night, front row centre. How cool is that?

Last, but not least is Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: The Musical (Star City Casino, Sydney), based on the movie of the same name. It was fabulooous! Natasha calls it a “gargantuan bedazzlement." We’d never been to a big-budget jukebox musical and we totally enjoyed ourselves: the costumes, the sets (Natasha particularly liked how Priscilla, the bus, came across as a character in her own right) and, of course, the songs, especially the first-act-ending “I Will Survive.” Priscilla is Australian through and through, a fact reinforced by cameos by koalas, emus and the Sydney Opera House.

Though apparently it closed early, the fact that a Big Gay Musical like Priscilla would be staged shows how much Australia has changed over the past 30 years, and how the 1997 election of John Howard dramatized in The Pig Iron People represented the last gasp of an old Australia. Judging by the stories, creativity and energy of these three plays, the new Australia promises to be an exciting place. It would be fun to come along for the ride.