Youth, Experience Work Magic on Fear & Misery
By Robert Macklin

It is the ultimate theatrical experience, the one where your spine starts to tingle, the hair at the back of your neck bristles as on stage, only meters away, you can see the birth of a star. Such is the possibility for theatregoers at the Belconnen Community Centre for the premiere tonight of George Huitker’s Fear and Misery of the Fourth Reich. But the “star” is no individual cast member, and perhaps not even the play itself. It is, rather, an explosion of local talent which has come together under the banner of ACTEST, one of the more exciting developments in recent Canberra theatre.

ACTEST stands for ACT Eminently Satisfying Theatre, a company which had its genesis when TAU Theatre was transformed last year to Upfront and to fully professional funding. This meant that the fringe theatre it was sponsoring was necessarily cut adrift and the young playwrights involved were thrown on their own resources.

They responded by producing three plays in March this year with the cooperation of the Belconnen Community Centre which waived theatre charges. They approached Ivor Selby, 58, a man of 40 years’ theatrical experience, to direct two of them. The timing could not have been more felicitous.

“I suppose I have directed 30 or 40 plays, but I really had retired,” Mr Selby said yesterday. “But then my son was killed in a motorcycle accident. My wife told me, ‘you either get back into theatre or you’ll go nuts’. So I did and it’s been a magnificent experience. There is just an unbelievable amount of talent in the group; lots of young people, some still at school, some out of work, others who have come back to theatre. It really is tremendously exciting.”

And as for the play, “there’s just so much energy. George Huitker, who also acts in it, enters in a cartwheel, and that’s just the beginning.”

Fear and Misery is an adaptation of the Bertold Brecht work on Hitler’s Germany. However, the 24-year-old playwright has halved the scenes and rewritten the work to place it in 2039. “I have made the characters almost caricatures and the theme is fear of totalitarianism,” Mr Huitker said. “But the amazing thing is that people see it as a commentary on today’s politics. They can identify the characters among today’s politicians.”

There are 32 characters played by about 22 cast members. No fewer than 70 costume changes take place under the supervision of Melody Lightbody who has made all the costumes for a total $50. “She is astonishing,” Mr Selby said. “But they all are.”

Three six-day seasons have been booked at Belconnen for next year, one coinciding with the National Theatre Festival. “If this means that we will be able to develop a fringe around the festival, that really will be satisfying, “ he said.

The Canberra Times

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“The Bitch that bore him,” Brecht was fond of reminding us in regard to Hitler, “is on heat again”. Indeed it would seem so if George Huitker’s youthful, up-to-date and witty adaptation of Brecht is any guide. For he finds in the year 2039 (for which read 1991) elements of apathy, laziness and veniality sufficient to plunge us all into a Fourth reich if we’re not careful.

Not at all your inaccessible Brecht, Fear and Misery consists of 10 short, rounded scenes, set in a hypothetical fascist state ruled over by Metal Mother (Margaret Tudor), a harridan dressed in enough foil to insulate a tank. The cast, is guided by director Ivor selby into a series of genuine performances. Whether playing pastiche trollops, torturers and soldiers or realistic mums, dads and assorted “riff-raff”, these performers, most of whom I had never seen before, represent a new and talented generation of stage interpreters.

The colourful costumes designed by melody Lightbody take us into a bright but desperate future - if we let it happen to us.

Tanya Greve, as a strong-minded victim, and Matt Taylor, as her tortured torturer, remain in the mind for the power of their acting. Teena, Les and Natasha Menezes as the Grumblebum family in a little play reminiscent of Brecht’s The Informer show us a nicely-judged two-dimensional family ridden with fear of the Reich. Felicity Boyd plays a sharply-timed assortment of fascists, spies and bimbos.

I would question Selby’s decision to play the scene changes so quietly and slowly, and to give the generals and agents Nazi accents. After all, if Goulburn is the centre for incarceration and Braidwood the home of the mindless, then the accents should be ours.

Still it is all just good, disturbing fun, with parts for a huge cast and an opportunity for the actors to speak out some rhyming couplets about the environment, and the current political climate.

ACTEST means ACT Entirely Satisfying Theatre. To the performers, Fear and Misery was obviously a treat. To the audience it was both entertaining and shocking. And since, as the play says, “Say what you like, theatre is fine, but the critics deliver the very last line” it seems appropriate to welcome a new, community-based theatre group.

Helen Musa, The Canberra Times, 1991

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This was one of those difficult evenings where you have to applaud the attempt (new theatre group... definite encouragement for local playwrights who fell into a bit of a void when the TAU Theatre fire took a welcoming space and a play festival away... some use of the Belconnen Theatre for more than yoga) but wonder the result (local playwright with at least one interesting piece of theatre under his belt takes on an adaptation of a modern classic by one of the twentieth century’s more influential theorists about the nature of theatre and comes up with something which is neither George or Bert...)

Now the wisdom of a director buttonholing a critic during the interval and talking about anything other than the weather is dubious. I don’t know about the rest but for me interval is important thinking time. (Even overhearing audience discussion can skew what you are going to write.) To be fair, Ivor Selby (in his capacity as director/ticket-seller/coffee server) was offering tea and a welcome but I found it hard not to start some hard thinking when he said, “This is George’s play” in response to some comments of mine concerning the original Fear and Misery.

Having both read and acted in Brecht’s version, I found myself missing its strengths in this production, largely because the script was still so dependent on its model that the production needed to stay much more conscious of those strengths. From the changes there seemed to be tantalising hints of a desire to get stuck into the subject of Tiananmen Square massacre as well as a yearning to go for an un-Brechtian sense of fun. However, for it to be truly “George’s play” there had to be more Huitker in it and less Brecht-turned-into-farce.

Which was where this show went at its worst. The pity of it was that the broad playing of Teena and Les menezes (in the scene where the child betrays its parents... much more Bert than George here) was excellent knock-about fun. But the chill down the spine of the original was missing and replaced by something that really didn’t matter much at all to the audience. (Why use the model at all if you want to be doing something else?) And despite what Huitker says in the programme about Brecht regarding ‘characterisation and emotional involvement in the theatre (for actors and audience) as secondary to its message or moral contained’ the reality is that Brecht plays are anything but uninvolving for an audience. (Should Grusha have kept the child? Should she have picked it up in the first place? Does the earth go round the sun and is that truth worth dying for? Why would a child betray its loving parents to the Nazis?)

The chill of the Torturer/Victim scene was likewise leeched away as Torturer Matt Taylor was allowed to go over the top. His death and Victim Tanya Greve’s reaction hinted at the power that was possible here, but it was only really in the scene where the priest is rounded up for questioning that some quiet underplaying from Janine O’Dwyer as The Reverend made us see how strong the material could have been.

Huitker has compounded the problem by setting the play in 2039, thereby losing the Nazi frame of reference (one which, for all its factual and fictional permutations, from documentary and Nuremburg trials to The Great Escape and Hogan’s Heroes remains quite powerful enough as reality and metaphor for an audience to relate and draw from), and substituting the dangerous and difficult territory of a future dystopia. And as any science fiction fan will tell you, that’s a hard area to succeed in, particularly in a visual medium.

Most of the time we got students protesting (over what?) and cardboard futuristic fascists straight out of ‘Allo ‘Allo (the gunshots were initially frightening but why was it all happening?) and unmotivated fights in food queues (why were there food queues? I now why in germany between the wars but I don’t know why in 2039.) Melody Lightbody’s costume designs made a good difference between ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, showing that selection, not money, is often the key to good design, but I really had no clear idea what this future was all about. As a result, I kept being pushed back to what I remembered of Bert’s original.

The production further compounded its difficulties by allowing great acres of time at least they were augmented by music) to stretch out in the blackout scene changes, most of which simply seemed to consist of moving a scaffolding and some chairs. Why do this is in the dark? Why not make it part of the show? Admittedly this allowed me time to remind myself that the score for Dune would be a good addition to the record library, but it didn’t help tighten the tension. Blackouts give the audience time to relax and talk. The night I was there they took full advantage. perhaps it is time for directors and lighting designers to rediscover the cross-fade.

Some of the best moments were the single-spot Brechtian direct-address-to-the-audience bits; cool, conversational and telling... and usually defused moments later by a long thumping blackout and a descent into misplaced humour or overplaying.

My verdict has got to be tough.

Trust the original and do it... or write your own play.

Alanna Maclean, MUSE, 1991