Inheriting fear and envy
By Helen Thomson March 7 2003
Theatre: Inheritance Melbourne Theatre Company, written by Hannie Rayson, directed by Simon Phillips. At the Playhouse Theatre until April 5
In Inheritance, Hannie Rayson is stirring the possum again, with a vengeance. Her play is an almost complete inventory of rural woes in contemporary Australia and her wit and passion dedicate it to a challenging political agenda. We laugh, often and hard, but this is a grim assessment of the realities of Australian rural life and Australian character.
It's all about land, of course. The fraught question of who gets the farm is embedded in a subtext that goes back to terra nullius and forward to Mabo. Then it incorporates Pauline Hanson and One Nation, with a footnote to the stolen generation debate.
Here, Rayson penetrates one of the hallowed silences of rural white Australia: what to do with the "black bastards" fathered by white landowners. Conveniently illegitimate and therefore outside any line of succession, nevertheless these half-caste family members are an embarrassing reminder of a more ancient land tenure. Even more dangerous to notions of orderly inheritance is the daughter-in-law, the woman who might lay claim to property even after death or divorce has sundered her from the family. It's a stroke of genius to make this character the play's Hanson character, mouthing "ownership" myths, feeding her own resentment at dispossession into a politics of fear and envy.
Thus another scab is picked off a rural sore - being female can be as much a disadvantage as being black, at least when it comes to the bedrock issue of inheritance of land.
Inheritance is a big play, its sweep aspiring to comprehensiveness and reflecting the solid research that went into its writing. It is a family saga with a plot that consists largely of following the repercussions of personal relationships. The family's history is also that of Australia itself, at least in the country. It has a powerful subtext that reveals the relentless realities - economic, political, climatic - that are undermining a frequently idealised way of life and leaving it in the slipstream of modernity. It is an enormously impressive achievement. If the play has a fault, it is that it tackles too much, raises too many issues; but what a forgivable lapse this is in a contemporary theatre culture that is so often disappointingly minimalist.
We are absorbed into the world of the 80-year-old matriarchal twins Dibs Hamilton and Girlie Delaney, into a family life as complex, passionate and violent as anything in international relations. Every line rings true; indeed much of the play's humour arises from just this, the recognition of characteristic speech that often, for example, couches affection in insult.
The city character of William (Rhys McConnochie) shows the degree of his alienation from country ways and rural masculinity the moment he complains that he has not been greeted with polite civility by his father.
As Dibs and Girlie, Monica Maughan and Lois Ramsey practically steal the show, all the more remarkably since it is their deadpan delivery, their deadly and ironic wit, and their dedication to peacemaking that makes them so true to their type. Yet Rayson doesn't shirk from also revealing their bedrock racism and a will to power that causes catastrophic instability in the family.
The deepest shock this play creates is not at the revelation that the adopted Aboriginal son Nugget (Wayne Blair) is in fact the biological son of Dibs' husband Farley (Ronald Falk), but the ruthless rejection of him - the prop and stay of his father and the best farmer in the family - out of a mixture of ancient sexual jealousy, Presbyterian respectability and sheer racism on the part of Dibs. Blair's performance is one of the highlights, matched by Steve Bisley's bruising, powerful depiction of Lyle Delaney. Geraldine Turner is terrifyingly good as the Hansonite Maureen Delaney; ruthless, opportunistic and utterly convinced of her rights.
Julie Nihill and Gareth Ellis, along with McConnochie, convincingly introduce factors of non-conformism, sexual, political, and social. Simon Phillips's direction is clear and economical, building a very satisfying and enjoyable performance of this ambitious play.
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