Review – The Hansard Monologues: Age of Entitlement
Even the ABC discontinued its television broadcasts of parliamentary debate in the graveyard shift, when only those desperate to be lulled to sleep with boredom tuned in, so who would have thought it possible to craft a piece of lively, entertaining and instructive “verbatim” theatre from edited extracts of Hansard?
Katie Pollock and Paul Daley certainly thought so when they decided to trawl the records of the 44th parliament of Australia to fashion the drama of parliamentary debate as an entertainment for the stage.
The result is a surprisingly engaging work which highlights the ideas and arguments of the speakers by collecting them around themes such as the carbon tax, asylum seekers, Indigenous Australians, same sex marriage and so on.
Resisting the temptation to satirise those whom it would be all too easy to mock, Timothy Jones has directed his terrific cast of four (Andrew Tighe, Heather Mitchell, John Gaden and Michelle Doake) to take the words of the politicians seriously, and focus on their intent.
Not that all the speeches are serious. There is a fair amount of humour in the play, perhaps no scene more so than when Heather Mitchell, as Speaker Bronwyn Bishop, ejects 18 members of the Opposition one after another, setting one of several records in her parliamentary career.
Some speeches are even astonishingly moving, such as Melissa Parke’s eulogy on the death of Malcolm Fraser.
Strangely enough, this show does much to restore one’s faith in democracy and parliamentary debate. Highly recommended. (ID)
Until Aug 13, varied show times. Seymour Centre, Cnr City Rd & Cleveland St, Chippendale. $36-$45. Tickets & info: www.seymourcentre.com.au
