Night on Bald Mountain

Melita Jurisic. Image by Pia Johnson. 

Malthouse Theatre and its Associate Artist, Matthew Lutton, have revived Patrick White’s rarely-performed 1964 work Night On Bald Mountain for a Melbourne premiere, and they have done it with notable and enjoyable success, piling on the gothic melodrama and the witty retorts.

Night On Bald Mountain, a work which White had a troubled and complicated relationship with and never wanted to see staged again, and is reported to have described as ‘a dishonest play‘, is frequently described as White’s attempt at the ‘first Australian tragedy’. Actually, though, it’s a thoroughly funny work; not quite a black comedy – one might call it a white tragedy, and while it’s hard to argue with a Nobel Prize winner when he calls his work dishonest, it is nevertheless a complex, insightful, interesting and sharply funny script.

Lutton has taken a straightforward approach: take a simple and inspired gigantic tiered plywood stage set – a very literal bald mountain – and stuff it with some of Australia’s finest acting talent. Julie Forsyth, Melita Jurisic, Peter Carroll and Sue Jones burn an absolute hole through this script. With perfect comic delivery, crisp nuance, glorious overacting and hilarious contrasts of the overcooked gothic with the ocker and mundane, every scene is a pleasure to watch.

Fundamentally, Night On Bald Mountain is in the finest Gothic tradition: the story of two terrible people being terrible to each other and to those around them, being endlessly melodramatic and needy and spiteful and self-absorbed, and tragically unable to be anything else. Professor Sword, an aging, creatively dessicated academic (Carrol), and his alcoholic, melancholic, woe-is-me wife Miriam (Jurisic) live on Bald Mountain, overlooking the ‘rhinestones of Sydney’, surrounded by sassafras and the stray goats of the gumbooted, thoroughly unpolished, fencepost-stealing Miss Quodling (Forsyth). The arrival of the pure, innocent, good and thoroughly desirable Nurse Summerhayes (Nikki Shiels) sends the husband and wife into a passive-aggressive, selfish tug-of-war that ends, needless to say, tragically. There are other characters, but as the young lecturer Dennis Craig (Luke Mullins) remarks to the housekeeper Mrs Sibley (Sue Jones), ‘Mrs Sibley, you and I appear to be the minor characters of the piece – that alone should make us happy.’

Here I will take a moment to gush about Dale Ferguson’s totally impressive set: four enormous, precarious plywood tiers filling the Merlyn theatre, plus a basement area into which the characters could hurl things they (dramatically) no longer wanted. The set, complete with pop-up plywood goats, doors and retractable walls, made a vast, gorgeous canvas for Paul Jackson’s rather lovely lighting, and the top tier was ably occupied by composer, singer and thoroughly versatile cello player Ida Duelund Hansen, providing haunting musical strains where necessary.

The only real difficulty with the piece was the character of Stella Summerhayes. I’ve seen Nikki Shiels do great things before, and she certainly wasn’t delivering a performance reminiscent of a high-school musical then, all stilted over-enunciated delivery and hands-by-sides. Whether it was the direction, White’s awkwardly formal script (harder to buy in the mouth of a young character) or Shiels’ interpretation of Summerhayes as an awkward actor rather than an awkward person, I cannot say, but a more natural and believable delivery would really have made the piece pretty near perfect. In addition, one of the play’s key motivations – the exact nature of Summerhayes’ relationship with her distant father – remains confusingly blurry, leaving one choosing between the Freudian and the bleak in a way that doesn’t add much to the work.

Night On Bald Mountain wavers interestingly between feminism, misogyny and general misanthropy; it muses on the human habits of worship and religion; it explores love and beauty and failure and goats. This is a beautiful and chewy bit of theatre, and the two and a half hours flew past without a moment’s boredom.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Malthouse Theatre, Southbank
www.malthousetheatre.com.au
May 5 – 25