Stephen Gray
Review of the week
Although the last grim episode in the life of the “Breaker” takes place during the mopping up operations of that Anglo- Boer South African War of atrocities, we locals have never become as steamed up about it as his fellow Australians. When the Breaker Morant stageplay of 1979 was produced by Napac (in 1987), the balance of sympathies turned out all wrong for us.
Perhaps we lost too many of our own to shed more tears over some wronged Commonwealth berserker. Besides, he was accused of following more than orders, and not only by raping enemy women up in the chaotic Spelonken District and disposing of prisoners. Apparently he also potted off a neutral Berlin missionary because he was escaping to report the ungentlemanly tactics of the Bushveld Carbineers to someone closer to hand than his God, commander-in-chief Kitchener himself.
And it hurts, as the grizzled old Jerry says – when he comes wonderfully to life in this new and extraordinary play – to be shot in the back, especially by some Ozzie spoilers on a killing spree.
The earlier play about Lieutenant HH Morant and his mate, Peter Handcock, restaged their court martial (in the building that is now the Pietersburg Club). Purportedly Kitchener scapegoated those spunky republican volunteers to appease the press and even Kaiser Bill, and he shot them just to demonstrate that the firepower was back in ethical hands. The famous 1980 film of the play, punting for the whingeing rouseabouts all right, was filmed in New South Wales with never a genuine one of their victims in sight.
But yet, there was some doubt about their guilt as, unusually for the executed, they share a marked grave to this day in Pretoria’s old cemetery – not part of your regular war casualties, but adjacent to them, under their own weeping wattles. There the Mudgeeraba Troop of the 14th Australian Light Horse Regiment have recently cleaned up their common tombstone, in view of the current anniversary ceremonies.
This graveyard is the setting for the new version of the “Breaker” controversy, Brian O’Shaughnessy’s ingenious and deeply moving retort to all that nationalism by numbers, devised rather bravely to tour the Natal battlefields. I caught the show at the Hilton College Theatre last week, where it held a huge crowd of schoolkids enraptured through each rhetorical twist and thrust.
When the impressive, lanky Ben Voss as the “Breaker” finally rises centre stage, rips off his top and admits his guilt as the bullets strike, you certainly were shocked into something like a cathartic rush, even into feeling that whole century of wrong being turned aright. One hoary pensioner was so stirred he leapt to his feet, shouted, “Good on yer, blue,” and burst into tears. This is the very difficult process of coming clean in action.
A Time to Die is staged in an appropriately new South African way, too. This time around, once the scattered action settles into the hearing, the audience is invited in as the final arbiter to consider your verdict – a neat reference to the participatory drama of Springbok Radio in days of old.
And now the three Bs of the conflict (Dominic Fundam as the black Mr Angazi, gravedigger; Don Ridgway as the dreadfully by-the-book Brit, Brigadier Doyle; and John van de Ruit as the strapping burgher lad felled while cooking up some veldkos for those starving commandos) are the ones to bring Morant to account.
Before them he tries out his bit-of-a- poet, wistful demotic about breaking brumbies in the Outback (taming ponies), and who’ll be riding old Harlequin now, the Transvaal being full of loony galahs up a gum tree, anyway. But, in the end, it simply does not wash. A symposium of vengeful dead men, they will not rest in peace until he has been likewise reduced.
In O’Shaughnessy’s script, which he directs as well, while also playing the ghostly missionary, the ungrateful dead get to talk for once, telling us exactly what it is they resent about war – any war. When Morant simply will not lie down and die, there is a terrible moment when the friendly gravedigger, for a fee, offers to chop his rotten head off with a spade. You find yourself wondering if, appealing as he is, he would not be better dead, after all.
But then you recover yourself and vote for life instead. You applaud these daring players for their release of what has been in short supply recently in South Africa – the mercy of very involving theatre.