A large television screen cast a lurid blue glow over the foyer. On the screen, an exclamation mark inside a triangle, like a road sign warning of a bridge down, drew attention to the words below:
'This show contains guns and physical violence, firearms, death, explicit language, sexual content, apocalyptic themes and depiction of a nuclear disaster. Please be advised that this show contains loud noises, flashing, intense lighting and the use of haze.'
I thought it was parody. Of course, it might have been both warning and parody at the same time. You can’t tell.
The last play I saw in the university, decades ago, was Oedipus Rex, performed in the old Union House theatre near Wilson Hall. Years later the theatre moved a hundred metres to the arts and cultural centre, a swirling architectural fantasy that has an interior with no straight lines and a colour scheme like blueberries in a blender.
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He took a hansom to the university. The drive occupied twenty minutes, but by the time he passed Wilson Hall he was still uncertain what he should say … The cab skirted the low original university building and pulled up before a red brick house in a neat ugly garden. … He found Matthew seated in an armchair near the window. On two low tables on either side of him were piles of foolscap examination papers, the accumulated result of hours of mental strain on the part of Melbourne’s scholastic youth.
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The university and its grounds seethe ghostily, its eras overlapping. It stands aloof, immovable, changeless, but sometimes a building falls and another rises. After having pre-theatre drinks at Naughton's Hotel directly opposite the university, we crossed Royal Parade where the trams trundle irrespective of time, walked along Tin Alley through early moonlight, and entered the arts and cultural centre where an obliging elevator took us into the purpleness above.
We sat near the front and off towards stage right, their left, in C3, C4, C5, C6 and D1; me, the two older teenagers, their mother, and one of their friends. There were the usual mousing hushed voices and scurried movements behind the curtain; coughs were coughed and throats were cleared in the audience, as if their owners were inclined to jump on stage and join the cast.
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… Raoul went daily to the Melbourne University. … (he) absolutely refused to go to Trinity College. He travelled every day, with clerks and business men, by electric tram and by train, to study humane letters in the neighbourhood of Wilson Hall.
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In Act One the players gather for human society after some catastrophic event. They nestle on abandoned sofas, firing braziers, and verbally reconstructing an episode—‘Cape Feare’—of a television comedy, The Simpsons. A pedantic player who talks too much corrects another who falteringly attempts to complete a line. Despite catastrophe, a hierarchy is already shaping itself. Interlopers appear. Guns are pulled by the sofa-dwellers, medieval-style, like drawn swords. Defence joins hierarchy.
Act Two occurs seven years later when the script lines of the comedy have been commoditised like a currency; bought and sold and stolen. The players are attacked.
Act Three advances another seventy-odd years, when shards of the original television episode have been mythologised into a kind of fossilised musical Greek tragedy on board a houseboat.
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‘Mr. Burns: a Post-Electric Play’ by Ann Washburn. Performed by the Little House Players at the Union Theatre, Melbourne University.
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Extracts from The Montforts, Martin Boyd, Constable, 1928.
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