It was apt that the evening of what would have been my dearest friend’s 66th birthday, 7 November, I spent at the theatre. Monica was a theatre devotee and saw everything from Broadway blockbusters to the most modest and quirky amateur shows. Whenever we could we went to the theatre together. Given Monica’s catholic tastes and our countless conversations about the merits of the productions we saw, Alice Spigelman’s The Kingdom of Eucalypts at the Bondi Pavilion was also an apt choice.
It was raining and the skies above Bondi’s ecru sands and glass green surf-less ocean provided a muted backdrop. The Pavilion has been extensively and expensively renovated since I was last there, but as that was in 1970 to see Graham Bond and Rory O’Donohue in Hamlet on Ice, some refurbishment was to be expected. There are exhibition spaces but both were closed as was the bar, so I was pleased I’d had a glass of on-tap NZ Marlborough Sav Blanc at the Icebergs en route.
 |
| Bondi Beach evening of 7 November 2024 (my photo) |
I had selected the play on a number of grounds: commemorating Monica on her birthday, revisiting an iconic Sydney venue, ticket availability during a short visit, and its subject matter. The Kingdom of Eucalypts is subtitled The Enigma of Miles Franklin. I think the title is drawn from Franklin’s posthumously published memoir, Childhood at Brindabella while the subtitle accurately reflects the playwright’s inconclusive picture of this classic Australian author. Monica and I shared an appreciation of Miles Franklin, of the 1979 film of My Brilliant Career and of Australian literary history generally. The play tells the story of Miles Franklin’s life on her return to Sydney in 1932 after years of living in Chicago and London. The early triumph of My Brilliant Career is well behind her and she is trying to get her more recent works published, with little success. She feels stuck caring for her elderly widowed mother, living frugally in suburban Carlton. Miles bonds with charismatic publisher PR ‘Inky’ Stephensen over their shared passion for forging a distinctly Australian cultural identity independent of Britain. In regard to these goals, Franklin was also active in the Fellowship of Australian Writers and the Sydney PEN Club championing emerging writers and supported the new literary journals Meanjin and Southerly though these facts I gained from Wikipedia, as The Kingdom of the Eucalypts dwells almost exclusively on her tumultuous relationship with Stephensen.
 |
| Official poster for the production (Moira Blumenthal Productions) |
The problem with The Kingdom of Eucalypts is that it literally TELLS the story of Franklin’s life. Alice Spigelman has done her research and regurgitates it via not one but two Miles Franklins (the ingénue of My Brilliant Career and a contemporary one). We are treated to a recounting of biographical data with regular self-conscious feminist observations about the unfairness of gender roles and a longed for future where female writers do not need to adopt masculine nom de plumes. The exploitation of the inherent tensions and drama of Franklin’s life is minimal. Given her fraught relationship with her mother, who was disdainful about her indiscreet depiction of the family, frustration with the curse of early success, famed refusal of marriage proposals and flirtation with fascism, there was ample scope for confrontational themes, but the rancour and passion of scenes that touch on these themes were mild. Instead we got screeds of discursive ‘text’ from the two Mileses with Spigelman puzzlingly, perhaps to be even handed in apportioning speeches to the actors, putting insights and questions into the mouths of the younger and older protagonists almost arbitrarily. Alan Bennett’s more successful use of the technique of multiple personae in The Lady In The Van came to mind.
The scene that most captured some of the real tensions and contradictions of Franklin's life was when she visits Inky in detention and he rails against her lack of loyalty and indignation at his imprisonment. I have since read that his internment in 1942 for supposedly supporting and even potentially spying for the Japanese and Germans was based on flimsy, circumstantial evidence and was a major abuse of his human rights.
There is always a danger in applying a modern lens to the behaviour of our cultural heroes. I approached Anna Funder’s Wifedom with a trepidation that reading her impeccably realised work proved unfounded. Alice Spigelman’s attempt to fathom the supposed contradictions of Franklin’s character, giving her the benefit of the doubt about her adherence to Inky’s right wing nationalism, felt slightly redundant. Any examination of the cultural and political scene of 1930s and 40s Australia, or indeed of any period of social evolution, reveals that things are seldom clear-cut. Norman Lindsay was a champion of free speech; creator of beloved Bunyip Bluegum and that grumpy Puddin’, a technically brilliant etcher and watercolourist but who also created those ghastly Bacchanalian pastiche scenes and some deeply racist cartoons. Likewise Margaret Preston, a hugely talented and influential artist who produced many works that remain at the centre of a modern sense of Australian-ness, advocated an adoption of Aboriginal art motifs, which she described as ‘emotional’ and ‘rhythmic’, to create designs and decor evoking the ‘same primitive feeling with an educated result’[1]. Is it realistic to focus only on the paternalistic, uninformed language without acknowledging Preston's real appreciation and promotion of Indigenous art, culture and experience however clumsy it may seem in modern terms?
 |
| The two Miles Franklins: Sarah Greenwood and Beth Daly (image Igor Turin sourced from https://www.stagewhispers.com.au/reviews/kingdom-eucalypts) |
I don’t know if the small turn out on the night I saw the play was typical. If so I pity the cast who have had to sustain a season of twenty two performances. One imagines any doubts about the wordy script they felt during rehearsal may have been assuaged by believing the ‘magic’ would occur when the play was presented to large sympathetic audiences. Playing to only a handful of us yet pitching the intensity of their performances for a fuller house did not make for a subtle experience. Sarah Greenwood (the younger Franklin) and Beth Daly (the older) were burdened both with propelling the story and with dialogue of an expository and declamatory nature not supporting nuanced performance; nevertheless both were likeable and engaging. Alice Livingstone (Miles’ mother) and Lloyd Alison-Young (Inky) had the advantage of far fewer lines and less didactic writing so elicited some of the play’s few gentle laughs.
I notice that the Melbourne Theatre company is currently staging a musical adaptation of My Brilliant Career and it is getting raves. Perhaps a visit to Melbourne is in order. Je ne regrette rien though… Monica and I would have enjoyed dissecting the production of The Kingdom of Eucalypts, Bondi’s beauty and its elegant Pavilion did not disappoint and the gentle rain fitted the mood well.
The Kingdom of Eucalypts, is at the Bondi Pavilion from 30 October until 17 November 2024.
[1] Leslie, Donna, Margaret Preston and Assimilation, Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, Vol 18 No 3, Sept 2015
