The Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts 27 February-1 March 2007

Con’s Spire has a script well worth listening to, full of pithy, witty observations on the contradictions, paradoxes and suspicions of modern society and its irrefutable potential for devious manipulation of its members. So was it the writer, the director or the actors themselves who decided to sabotage the flamboyant verbiage with that high speed wreckage of a delivery, soooo characteristic of the slightly frightened amateur?

Beleaguered, simple-living Con’s (David Rendell) single bright ambition to erect a giant spire turns his suburban backyard into a battleground for the right to artistic self-expression, regardless of meaning or aesthetic appeal. The strenuous objections of Mike (Nick Dale) and Dell (Ingrid White), Con’s Double-Income-No-Kids neighbours, are based on sound capitalist motives, starting with lowering property values and moving on to a range of wily arguments countering Con’s entreaties for tolerance. His teenage hermaphrodite Toni (Jessamy Ross), astray in a series of derivative fantasies, does much to escalate tensions between the rival territories, even resorting to ray-gun blasts to solve the conflict.

Director of Singing, Bernard Houston’s distinctive interpretations of popular songs, unaccompanied by musical instruments, allow the cast to establish mood and message as the story evolves. There is a sentimental poignancy in the stark performance of Gone are the Green Fields at the outset of the play. The visionary futurism of Across the Universe becomes a melee of each character’s disparate idealism in the context of the play’s ending. Houston manages the impossible and achieves a soulless version of Je ne Regrette Rien by overlaying a mechanistic, stupefied tone to its recital, which instantly belies the well-known message of ultimate contentment in the song.

Jaz Muhling’s stage setting was a skilfully suggested suburban shed. Against a black backdrop, items such as a brushcutter and mower were suspended above a rough work-table strewn with tools and machinery including a lathe complete with flying sparks. The opulent, over-equipped home of Dell and Mike along with the pool from which they spring barely clad to reprove Con’s clamour are implied by loud splashes off stage and dialogue references, as is the rest of Con’s house, which harbours Toni and her nefarious pursuits.

All the elements for success were there, from the aptly intimate venue afforded by the Judith Wright Centre, to the talented cast and crew, and some very clever penmanship. What brought the play to the edge of calamity, however, was a simple error of judgement in direction. Faster than a speeding rapper, writer Errol Bray’s prime lines were intoned. The minimal but profoundly emblematic plot seemed to serve as theatrical device only, to give each character the opportunity for a swift – and we mean, swift – rundown on one conspiracy theory after another, some so bizarre even the well-read cynic heard something new.

Rather too self-consciously, and with no room for interpretive action or time to impart meaning into expression, the actors babbled their way through Iraq conspiracy, corporate conspiracy, anti-American conspiracy, gays and Jews conspiracy, noise conspiracy and even a cock conspiracy, to name but a few, snatching every opportunity to launch into their well-memorised tirades as though the remainder of the dialogue were a mere contrivance. The result was that every actor blew their lines. It is, in fact, to their credit that stumbles were kept to a minimum. The audience in turn, was cheated of the opportunity to relish Bray’s sense or diction. A pity, since what snippets could be grabbed from among the often poor enunciation (and did we mention the speed?) sounded thought-provoking and eloquent.

Con’s Spire works as a microcosmic study of the paranoia, judgement and assumption of every human interaction, from the individual to whole countries, and attempts to capture the gamut of human folly common to the modern era. The speeches of conspiracy-obsessed characters perfectly catch the runaway logic and snatched connections of the conspiracy theorist. The conflict over the fence works nicely as allegory for all human conflict; the homicidal, shallow, self-serving neighbours functioning as all things corporate and dare we say it, Western; and Con and his equally eccentric daughter the continually besieged, developing nation under threat of cultural, economic or physical takeover, and for whom compromise is the only resort in the face of greater might.

Artificial, mercenary era-opportunists Mike and Dell, spend the entire performance in their swimsuits, demonstrating self-assured brashness. They stand for all things commercial: Mike, a whiz with money who possesses that talent for verbosity without understanding so lauded by modern commerce, and Dell the archetypal new woman, who has traded the sensitivity of her gender for superficial gratification.

Con and Toni have none of the trappings of wealth or social achievement. They have no tidy lawn or plasma television, no fashionable clothes or hairstyles; they operate in that sub-culture of free capitalism bordering on anarchy without ever really breaking societal rules. They are the local embarrassment in the good street, their backyard a long-term, overgrown parking lot for some unidentifiable vehicle with rusting panels and wheels absent. Good citizens never really know if such families represent virtue or vice, in themselves or their detractors. The validity and virtue of compromise comes under implicit scrutiny along with all the other societal elements questioned overtly in the play.

Con certainly becomes enlightened to the merits of co-existence, an art he laments by the end of his long tussle with his tunnel-visioned neighbours. However, unless one’s foe changes their perspective, and accepts one’s particular vision, be it aesthetic, geographic, or religious, the only resort for peace is to compromise. But compromise is not all win-win, as any good MBA preaches. Compromise does, unfortunately, incorporate loss. Con’s compromise loses him his true vision, and what he ends up with is a mere model of his spire, a heavily-reduced version. Has he truly expressed himself at any level, or just lost the battle for his rights?

Toni, interestingly the sole character who indulges in actual physical violence despite her the many threats from her neighbours, and who in her adolescence entertains none of the shades of grey with which adults inevitably learn to paint their world, is appalled by the concessions of her father, his ‘appeasement’. Is it our knowledge that her youthful idealism must be curbed as she learns that mutual survival always requires sacrifices, or is it the speech of our own youthful selves decrying our own cop-outs that accounts for the melancholic wand that touches the climax of Con’s Spire?

Bray’s marriage of the resolution of compromise to a play based on conspiracy theories illustrates an ingenious observation of one of the great human dilemmas. Conspiracy in turn stands for the suspicion and distrust that haunt all human interaction from individual to communal levels, from primitive to modern times. If compromise is the most enlightened answer available to humanity, then even in the solutions to our doubt-generated conflicts, we are never sure if we have made the wrong choice and sold ourselves out. Life is doubt, no doubt. In life’s details, however, doubt can often be eliminated, and one point there can be no doubt about is that a good director directs his actors to honour a good script. Con’s Spire could have been saved by faith that this was indeed an excellent script and concept. The audience would have been more rather than less impressed with the actors’ considerable powers of memorisation and elocution had the delivery been of a less frenetic and pretentious pace. If the actors had savoured the words, we would not have been forced to quaff the nectar, and would have left the theatre abundantly more sated.

Details

Con’s Spire
Written & directed by Errol Bray
Assistant Director: Amy Ingram
Presented by Switchboard Arts in association with The Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts