‘Once In Royal David’s City’ – Belvoir

ONCE IN ROYAL DAVID’S CITY – BY MICHAEL GOW
DIRECTED BY EAMON FLACK
BELVOIR
8 FEBRUARY – 23 MARCH 2014

Sybil: Wow!
Lea: I just feel like we’ve been at a really momentous occasion – of a really important new work.
Sybil: Incredible. It’s one of those amazing pieces of theatre that not only makes you laugh, not just engages you, but has layers… it’s post-modern in that it plays with itself, it plays with the form and yet it’s emotionally engaging and I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time. I’m not sure what it all means yet.
Lea: I love that the program is also the script. I kept thinking ‘Oh I need to remember that’ and then I’m thankful that the script is in my handbag.
Sybil: I know, I really want to borrow it.
Lea: Oh! It’s ours. Joint custody!
Sybil: Incredible.
Lea: It’s self referential in the sense that it represents theatre and the protagonist is a director.
Sybil: Yes, and he sets different scenes.
Lea: He is the stage direction at the start… and then he ends up being didactic at the end and – that insane monologue.
Sybil: And the structure is not what I expected at all. It’s not one of those pieces of theatre where you knew how it is going to end.
Lea: But also you were never worried about that.
Sybil: Oh god no!
Lea: The trust, in the script and the actors and the direction.
Sybil: The cast!
Lea: Everything.
Sybil: The trust was incredible.
Lea: I will go wherever you want me to.
Sybil: Totally. The cast was amazing. Brendan Cowell was incredible. Tara Morice was incredible. I loved the guy who played the doctor – I thought he was fantastic (Lech Mackiewicz).
Lea: That doctor is an awful part of all of our lives – past, or future, or present.
Sybil: Yeah.
Lea: As soon as the structure revealed itself – I don’t know how to describe this – it felt familiar, but yet, I didn’t know what was going to happen.
Sybil: You absolutely felt like you were in the hands of professionals.
Lea: How about our seats!? We bought tickets – what only last week? There was limited availability so we chose up the back, off to the right. We sat there comfortably, going – ‘This is great! We’ve not sat up here before’. And then the front of house crew came up and said – ‘Look we have some seats free, would you like to move up a couple of rows’, and Sybil says – ‘How about over there?’ pointing to some even better seats right over the other side of the theatre, and the guy said – ‘You gotta go fast’.
Sybil: So I’m sprinting in my enormous heels.
Lea: In your heels! And then we came across another front of house person.
Sybil: And I went down the wrong aisle.
Lea: And he went ‘Aaaah!’ because he knew the lights were about to go down and so he just pointed and said – ‘Just go there’, and we sat down and went – ‘Oh! We are in house seats, 6 rows from the front, centre!’
Sybil: More centred than Geoffrey Rush and Jim Parsons who were sitting in the row in front.
Lea: Yes, there they were.
Sybil: It was really wonderful. And that young boy – that one scene, at Christmas on his skateboard…
Lea: It was gorgeous.
Sybil: A gorgeous scene. And also when he was playing the young German boy.
Lea: Oh wasn’t he great! Wasn’t he new just this week? I think he replaced that role this week (James Wright replaced Harry Greenwood). It reminds me of what happened with Toby Schmitz in Hamlet.
Sybil: This is up there for me, with Hamlet.
Lea: And a completely different style, different genre.
Sybil: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show like this. This is a new style.
Lea: Oh but it reminds me of Away.
Sybil: Yeah, but just the whole commenting on itself and commenting on the whole…
Lea: But isn’t that quite Michael Gow?
Sybil: Probably, maybe I just don’t know enough Michael Gow.
Lea: But how often do you get to see a new Australian work in its first season, where you get this connection and reaction immediately? And I’m trying to figure out what other premier seasons we’ve seen…
Sybil: Oh that awful one… STC, Fury.
Lea: Ah, Andrew Upton.
Sybil: Yeah. Who directed this?
Lea: This was Eamon Flack.
Sybil: The big, interesting thing for me, having just written up Falsettos, along with my little summary, I remembered how much the direction got in the way. The contrast with this, where you didn’t see the hand of the director, except that you knew that the hand of the director was there. So seamless. So strong.
Lea: So good.
Sybil: But you knew it was there because it was there in every touch, it was there in every brushstroke, in every pause.
Lea: In every gorgeous transition, in every moment of letting the actors just ‘be’ on stage.
Sybil: You know at the end of a song, when you finish singing a song, you don’t just break and go – they had moments at the end of a scene where the scene just kept going. Nothing was happening. Nothing. But they were just letting that scene end, before they broke.
Lea: Let the emotion swirl the stage, and the theatre, before they left, and it was the natural time to go.
Sybil: Now, I was sobbing like a baby – you weren’t as emotional.
Lea: I wasn’t, and I wonder if it’s not something that’s going on with me where I’m disassociating at the moment from really emotional stuff. But you obviously have a really personal connection.
Sybil: Well I obviously have – my brother-in-law died of pancreatic cancer. But I was totally thinking about my Mum. I was identifying with it absolutely. I’m not ready.
Lea: I couldn’t go there.
Sybil: I kept going there.
Lea: I usually brim over easily. But I’m obviously got some protection mechanism in place at the moment. I still completely loved the play – but I couldn’t think about my parents dying, I can’t!
Sybil: I was trying very hard not to, but to be honest, in this instance, I was hyper-aware, as you are when you’re crying, I was hyper-aware of how much noise I was making, and therefore how much noise everyone else was making… and I don’t think there were many other people crying. So that’s my read on it. I think it might just have been me.
Lea: But you couldn’t gauge the entire theatre from where we were, and there were others who gave it a standing ovation. We gave it a standing O.
Sybil: And I wasn’t ever not going to give it a standing O. I thought it was absolutely amazing. I thought Brendan Cowell was fantastic. I thought the work itself, on its own, deserved one.
Lea: I’m nodding!
Sybil: If I had to pick one thing that I didn’t like, there were times in that very long, angry, monologue about Marxism at the end where I was just – ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, enough!’. There was part of my brain that wandered and asked ‘Is Michael Gow a Marxist? Is this just ALL a really big political statement?’ And then I was having a debate with myself thinking – ‘No, I think this is the character’, right? But I think the fact that I had that moment of not even listening to what he was saying any more, but wondering about Michael Gow’s political allegiance, and, for me, that was just the tiniest tad too long, or too much, or too something.
Lea: It was the tiniest bit too long. I had that drop in concentration in the middle too. But I think the message unto itself, of being complacent, and not just taking what you’re given, and questioning, was actually a massively important message, and it probably needs refinement, because it became badgering.
Sybil: Yes that was my point. I think it was his character though.
Lea: Yes, it was character, but the Marxist angle became a too full on.
Sybil: Hectoring.
Lea: And what you really needed was just to challenge of the status quo.
Sybil: Here’s my other thought, it was almost two plays for me. In the sense that one story was incredibly personal – ‘My father died, my mother’s dying, my mother’s dead’. And the other story was him and his political view. Another thing for me during that big angry Marxist monologue at the end was me going – ‘I don’t understand’. There wasn’t enough of a link between ‘My mother’s died’ and ‘I’m going to deliver an angry Marxist harangue’ to these children. I didn’t quite get that. I don’t know that the children would have understood.
Lea: Yes, I was thinking, ‘I am getting this, but would have those year 11s?’.
Sybil: I think those Year 11s would be rolling their eyes and have left going ‘Oh my god! He was so full on’! I would have not known how to deal with that level of passion… in a teacher.
Lea: No, but he would have been a guest speaker.
Sybil: I think even more! I don’t know that I would have been able to deal with that level of passion.
Lea: Well not all of it, but I would have tried to take on quite a bit of it. I can imagine myself being like – the energy would just have reverberated into my body.
Sybil: Yeah, I think I would have been the one going – there’s all this energy and I would have gone – ‘Wow, this is WAY too much’ and just cut off and started looking at him like ‘You are a fucking crazy man’. I’m rolling my eyes and passing notes and making fun of him. That’s how I would have reacted.
Lea: I would have been absorbing, absorbing, absorbing.
Sybil: I walked out thinking 5, and now we’ve talked about it, I’m downgrading to a 4.5.
Lea: I was always at 4.5, and that’s a freaking good thing, because we’re at the first season of an amazing new work.
Sybil: Really important work.
Lea: There’s no reason for the half coming off except that I guess I wasn’t beside myself at the end.
Sybil: I was beside myself.
Lea: What’s the difference between this and Hamlet?
Sybil: Hamlet was as close to perfect as we’ve seen a theatre production. For me what the difference was, emotionally I was sobbing, but it didn’t quite satisfy me intellectually. I almost feel like there were bits that weren’t quite finished or polished or something. Whereas Hamlet, that’s been around for hundreds of years as a play.
Lea: A play that’s been cut and edited, ‘cos that wasn’t the full Hamlet.
Sybil: Of course not.
Lea: But this is the full play. It’s a conundrum I’m finding as to why this is a 4.5 and Hamlet was a 5. And it’s the emotional journey.
Sybil: Isn’t that fascinating, because for me the emotional journey was there, for you it’s the emotional journey that wasn’t there. So that’s really interesting because we’ve come out of it with the same score but for different reasons.
Lea: But it doesn’t detract from this show. I’ll totally tell people to come see it.
Sybil: Oh me too. I’m just gobsmacked that there are empty seats. It does not deserve empty sets on a Thursday night! It should be sold out.
Lea: There were blocks of seats empty, so those were people who…
Sybil: Didn’t come!
Lea: Awful.
Sybil: I think it’s great ’coz we got their seats! And can I just say one last thing?
Lea: Of course.
Sybil: I just loved, not just the singing, but the arrangements of those songs.
Lea: Oh my gosh, I wanted to mention that. Absolutely.
Sybil: And I thought Tara Morice’s voice was a revelation. I had no idea she could sing. She’s got a great voice!
Lea: Absolutely. And beautifully pitched and modulated and the volume and blending were excellent.
Sybil: 4.5 from both of us, and we got to take the wine in, so…
Lea: Big tick!

IN SUMMARY

Sybil: Such an interesting show – and I was right – one that keeps coming back to visit… I found myself looking forward to watching it again in 10 years (anyone want to add that to the schedule?) so that I can see how it matures and develops over time. The things that I loved about it just seem to get richer. Bravo, Belvoir. A wonderful show, cast and crew. And beautifully directed.
Lea: What a complete privilege to witness Michael Gow’s new work, in the hands of such a talented director, cast and company. I just adored Away when I first studied it, and Once In Royal David’s City felt like coming home, in a theatrical sense. What an honour.
Question: Does a show have to be a 5 out of 5 for you to give it a standing ovation?

PRE & POST SHOW DRINKS: There are lots of great places to eat and drink in Surry Hills, but we just love the vibe of the foyer. Plus Belvoir has such a great range of bite-sized, satiating morsels – how could we resist? Post show, the atmos was lovely. As it quietened down, many of the cast hung around, chatting and enjoying Geoffrey Rush’s company.
HANGOVER STATUS: Just as impactful as the play.
MORE INFO: belvoir.com.au/productions/once-in-royal-davids-city/

DRINKS ALLOWED IN THEATRE?