Review by Sarah Stephen
Vicious Streaks: Seven Stories for the New World
Written by Alex Broun
Directed by George Ogilvie & Lee Lewis
Darlinghurst Theatre, Greenknowe Avenue, Potts Point
until September 4
$27/$21 Bookings (02) 8356 9987
"It's about an untold side of Sydney", writer Alex Broun told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, explaining his latest play, Vicious Streaks, now playing at Sydney's Darlinghurst Theatre.
Broun uses the challenging and engaging style of several short plays in one, with actors playing different roles from one scene to the next. It works well. The character development is swift and effective, the acting crisp and engaging.
Broun feels that George Ogilvie, who co-directed the play, summed up best what Vicious Streaks was about when he said that each of the plays represent a version of reality that is stripped away to reveal something completely different.
Ogilvie told the August 6 Sydney Morning Herald: "It's to do with the problems people have with modern relationships, maintaining their sanity in the wild and savage world we live in."
Ogilvie, a high-profile director, got involved in this production simply because the script was good. "I like doing good theatre", the 73-year-old told the SMH. "This is beautiful theatre and good writing, so one does it, of course."
"It's a serious play looking at serious issues", Broun told GLW. "These are serious times we live in, and I wanted to reflect that." Despite tackling serious and complex issues such as euthanasia, and the absurdity of the legal system, there are a lot of laughs. The use of humour, and the clever and surprising twists at the end of some of the skits, help to give depth to Broun's messages.
"Events happening around the world affect people and the way they live their lives", said Broun. "There is a search through the play for humanity, compassion, justice, family and love."
Vicious Streaks is one of over a dozen plays written by Broun, whose career in acting began on the set of Neighbours in the 1980s. In recent years, his focus has been on writing and producing.
After five years in South Africa, Broun returned to Australia in 2000. "I was astonished at how much Australia had changed, how different attitudes were. It seemed to have become a selfish, greedy, nasty place overnight. The refugee issue struck me as appalling, people locked away for committing no crime." Broun went to a World Refugee Day rally in 2001 and was motivated to get involved in the Refugee Action Coalition.
Broun described how people started to come to him with theatre projects. "I became known as the refugee person in the theatre world." He directed Woomera, written by Joshua Wakely, one of the first plays in Australia which directly addressed the issue of refugees and detention.
Since 2001, Broun has been involved in three other plays with a refugee theme. He directed Purgatory Down Under, produced Refugitive, and wrote Blind City, which was part of the 2003 Sydney Festival, and had a refugee character.
Refugitive was a highlight, touring 40 cities and towns in five states over six months. It was a one-man show, with Iranian actor and refugee Shahin Shafei drawing on his own experience of being imprisoned in Curtin detention centre. Broun recounted how Shafei's props consisted only of those things he had had with him in detention — a mattress and a blanket — which made it easy to travel from town to town with the props in the back of the car.
"It had an authenticity which people responded to", Broun told GLW. They performed in churches, community halls and schools, and were put up by local Rural Australians for Refugees groups. In total, Broun estimates that they did over 200 performances, reaching more than 10,000 people with the play.
Broun recently received a grant from the Australian Film Commission to write a screenplay about the sinking of the SIEV X. He won a competition to write such a play, run by the Melbourne-based Rothfields, a philanthropic family who feel that the mystery of the SIEV X sinking should be given more attention.
"It will be from the survivors' point of view", Broun told GLW. "And I have spoken to 10 survivors so far. It will be juxtaposed with the story of Kevin Enniss." Enniss was an Australian people smuggler and federal police informant working in Indonesia. "The true story of the SIEV X has still not been told, and it will probably take a long time before people involved in the incident tell what they know." The screenplay will be "one possible scenario of what happened", Broun explained, based on survivor accounts, and the information gathered by Marg Hutton's sievx.com website and Tony Kevin's book, A Certain Maritime Incident.
The first draft of the screenplay will be completed within weeks, and already has a producer attached to the project, Antonia Barnard, who was line producer of The Quiet American. Ogilvie is slated to direct the film, and Russell Crowe will be approached to play a role, but the biggest hurdle is finding the money to finance it. Broun estimates it would need a budget in the arena of $5 million, given the need to, among other things, recreate the sinking of the SIEV X.
"It won't be a dry docu-drama", Broun emphasised. "It's an epic tragedy, and will make quite an action packed, horrific dram. It will also give a sense of the dislocation and turmoil of being a refugee." One of the big things about the SIEV X story, Broun pointed out, is that while the asylum seekers were waiting in Indonesia, September 11 happened, the Tampa happened, the children overboard incident happened. "These people were victims in the political machinations of the Howard government." Broun added that in his mind, there is no doubt that their boat was sabotaged.
Alongside work on the screenplay, Broun is also co-writing and researching a SIEV X documentary with Tom Zubrycki, who made Molly and Mobarak. This will be much more of a work of investigative journalism, and Broun hopes that it might actually get to the truth of what happened to the SIEV X.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, August 25, 2004.
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