A speech given by playwright Alana Valentine at
An Evening with The Alex Buzo
Company Advisory Board
November 25 2008
Alex Buzo mentored me during the production of my first
play at the Australian Theatre for Young People in 1985.
Our first meeting was at the Red Rose Cafe in Macquarie
Street where I ordered a pie and chips and he a packet of
peppermint Blizzards. He told me that if I would like
an actor to emphasize a certain word in a line I should
simply underline it! I told him that that ATYP director at
the time had told me that acting was a subtle artform and I
should not try to predicate the way a line should be said.
‘Nah, underline it where you think the emphasis is,’ he
told me. He also advised me not to use direct address to
the audience in my first stage play and then, when I did so
despite his warnings, he came up to me on the opening night
and told me that he was ‘quite wrong’ and that the direct
address had worked a treat. To me that has always stood as
a measure of great courage - this incredible gifted and
experienced writer willing to be surprised and revise his
judgement of a young writer who was really nothing more
than an opinionated upstart. It continues to be for me a
genuine and sincere brush with his greatness as an artist
and I am delighted to be participating in this project with
the play
Shafana and Aunt
Sarrinah.
Shafana
and Aunt Sarrinah
is partly a plea for understanding, partly a bellow of rage
from Muslim Australian women about the ignorance and
misunderstanding that surrounds the wearing of the
traditional Muslim headscarf. Based thoroughly on personal
interviews and produced with the sustained support of a
large number of Muslim women from a diversity of Muslim
cultures, this short play addresses theatrical and social
questions about representation, religious freedom and
inter-generational conflict raised by Buzo in
Norm and
Ahmed. Louis
Nowra noted that Buzo’s plays are about language
and how people 'use language as a deliberate tactic to
put other people off guard'
Norm and Ahmed
was where I first saw Australians presented in a way that I
could deeply identify with - not the fumbling inarticulate
attempts at lucidation chronicled in Patrick White or even
the charming warmth of Peter Kenna but the brutal undertow
of agression veiled in genial, irreverent humour. Indeed I
see a trajectory right through Australian theatre from the
first inclusion of the idiom, peppered throughout plays
where the vowels of English theatre still persisted,
through the experiments of the 60’s and 70’s where the
music, the rhythms and the tactics of our idiom were
explored, right up to and including the use of verbatim in
a contemporary Australia which is informed by religious,
cultural and global diversity of language. I made
Run Rabbit Run
as a pure verbatim play because one of my intentions was to
surprise audiences with the lucidity, philosophy and
courage of people who might stereotypically might be
dismissed as uncultured footy fans. I made
Parramatta Girls
as massaged verbatim because I wanted to invited audiences
to bear witness to the brutalization of the Australian
nation in its almost continuous history of incarcerating
children and puzzle over the adults it produced being some
of the toughest, funniest most loving women you are likely
to meet.
Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah,
likewise will surprise you with its portrait of Afgani
Muslim women who are articulate, highly educated, deeply
spiritual and profoundly enraged by the portrait that is
painted of them in the Australian and global media as
oppressed, meek, and silent.
That Buzo should be able to 'speak' through his play
Norm and Ahmed to
a contemporary Australian audience is a grand and noble
vision, one for which this Company was laudably founded.
But for Emma Buzo to have innovated a project where Buzo's
theme and concerns might be reignited in a new work by a
contemporary Australian writer, to a time and place where
the very notion of 'otherness' inherent in Buzo's play has
shifted fundamentally is genuinely exciting. In effect, it
allows the 'conversation' to move into a third dimension,
not just Buzo speaking anew through a new production to the
21st Century, but Buzo re-engaged and reflected and
responded to through a new theatrical vehicle, through the
voice of a contemporary playwright. What Emma Buzo is doing
is not simply asserting the continued relevance of the work
of Alex Buzo but, in effect, instituting a vision which
dares to examine Australian theatre as a historical
continuum, which longs for the conversation to speak not
only to the past and the present but for it to genuinely
engage with the future.
Let me urge you to support this Company if you are tired of
the form wars of the 1990’s. If you are sceptical about
avante garde always meaning non-naturalistic and
non-narrative, if you disagree that innovation always means
form not content, if you think that mere form experiments
are insufficient to the enormity of the challenges facing
our futures, if you want theatre to continue to unnerve and
engage in a debate with its society, if you think that
theatre can take a contemporary form and still be genuinely
radical in what stories it priviledges to the Australian
stage, and in who it invites into the audience for the
Australian stage. ‘The most common road sign in Australia
is form one lane’
2
wrote Alex Buzo in an Adelaide Review article from November
1998 entitled "The Narrowing of Theatre in the 1990’s"
‘During the thirty years I have earned a living as a
professional writer I have learned one thing. The theatre
will recover and become an art form again. I am sure of it.
No longer will everything come from one lane.’ Yes, Alex,
it will. And with no small thanks to your equally visionary
and highly motivated daughter and, we hope, several of the
people in this room who share just such a vision.
© Alana Valentine November 2008
1.
Louis Nowra in ‘Craft:Theatre’ from “Chihuahaus, Women and
Me’, Giramondo, 2005.
2. Alex Buzo in ‘The Narrowing of Theatre in the Nineties’,
from Adelaide Review November 1998.