if anyone should be blamed, it's somebody else
hate crimes
by paul rothwell
Thursday 31 March - Saturday 9 April 2005
BATS Theatre, Wellington
cast:
Erin Banks (Marlene)
Kate Fitzroy (Rosslyn)
Alex Greig (Felix)
Laughton Kora (Hayden)
James Stewart (Gareth)
Hadleigh Walker (Ace)
Sonia Yee (Elliot)
Lighting and sound design Joshua Judkins
Producer Louise Rae
Directed by David Lawrence
Okay, so technically speaking
Hate Crimes is not officially a
Bacchanals show. But it's the closest any non-Bacchanals show has come to
being a Bacchanals show - it was directed by
David, lit by
Josh and featured
James, Erin, Hadleigh and
Alex (and after
Measure For Measure
Kate counts as a Bacchanal as well)
and, as at least one review pointed out, it was staged following the same
ideals The Bacchanals hold dear. The world premiere of this brilliant play
by Paul Rothwell (winner of Playmarket's Young Playwrights' Contest and
nominated for a Chapman Tripp for his 2004 Fringe play
Golden Boys) was produced by
Bovine University in association with The Bacchanals in March 2005 at
BATS Theatre and played to jam-packed houses throughout its short run.
There has been much debate as to the status of the play in terms of this
'site, but we thought it was high time it got a page to itself with some
photographs, maybe some reviews, and anything else we could get around to
doing.
Gareth is a tragic loner outcast teen who attempts suicide and ends up a
vegetable, starting a chain of events of increasing ludicrousness and
violence amongst his family and friends as they struggle against the
stereotypes that bind them together in the big family feud of society.
Marlene is the battered wife turned emancipated mother who finds that her
freedom brings consequences and responsibility she doesn't enjoy. Hayden
is a homosexual music teacher who fights prejudicial attitudes that have
labelled him a pervert and kiddie fiddler for his whole life, but can't
keep his hands off his newly brain damaged student. Rosslyn is a former
disabled rights activist reduced to homecare nursing in her retirement-age
years who resents such undeserving beneficiaries as Marlene getting
privileges she fought so hard for. Tired of being treated like a second
class human, Elliot the Chinese exchange student re-enacts Gareth's suicidal
behaviour in a bid to punish those who bullied him also. Ace is a confused
right-wing extremist who hates minorities and finds love in the unlikeliest
of places. But the love that builds him up nurtures the hate that eventually
brings him down. Felix, the school bully blamed for Gareth's suicide
attempt, rises up to take his rightful place as the white, male heterosexual
hero of the play. Hate Crimes is a
misleadingly controversial take on race relations, gender politics,
activism and the way society evolves, illustrating the biblical instruction
"Before you stoop to take the speck out of your brother's eye, remove the
log from your own."
Most theatre trades in truth. Regardless of genre, style or content, most
plays seek to explore or exploit some reality of human experience. And
sometimes the truth is hard to take.
Paul Rothwell's Hate Crimes begins
with playground bullying. Over the next two inexorable hours he explores
the capacity for everyone and anyone to vent hatred on other people. The
hated become the haters. And he tracks the inevitable outcome. In the
hate game, no-one wins.
But the play is not a lecture, although most of the characters are given to
cobbling moralistic justifications, both before and after events have turned
them into haters. And what they say is every-day currency in the real world.
We sometimes say or think it ourselves.
To start with it's easy to empathise with the bullied Gareth and Chinese
fee-paying student Elliot who boards with his family. Even their tormentor
Felix prompts sympathy as he wrestles with the unexpected consequences of
his actions. Gareth's car smash suicide attempt is all too credible and one
can only feel for his separated mother Marlene and be grateful his
professional caregiver Rosslyn is there to help.
The very 'out-there' gay Maori schoolteacher Hayden, Marlene's best friend
since school days, seems to have a sound sense of justice and good strategies
for turning around antisocial behaviour. Even Rosslyn's son Ace seems capable
of growing out of the hate group he's joined as a way of expelling his inner
angst.
When love blossoms between Marlene and Ace, the future seems rosy. But
everyone can succumb to hatred and act on it. It's just a question of what
would release that impulse.
What if Hayden was exploiting the brain-damaged and physically helpless
Gareth? What if Elliot was physically harming himself to garner sympathy
then blackmailing Hayden for cold hard cash? What if Rosslyn's good works
hid an inveterate hatred of human weakness at all levels?
The undeniable truth of Erin Banks' Marlene makes her metamorphosis into
violent hatred as compelling as it is shocking. Hadleigh Walker's
tunnel-visioned Ace is especially unnerving when he exhibits the values
of a good family man in the home.
James Stewart and Alex Grieg realise the complexities of Gareth and Felix
with great authenticity. Sonia Yee's Elliot and Laughton Kora's Hayden
demand the audience confront their own hidden prejudices, and compensating
tendencies, by transcending stereotypes to individualise their self-serving
characters.
On opening night Kate Fitzroy's intelligently observed Rosslyn had yet to
compel belief and empathy.
Director David Lawrence premieres Rothwell's challenging work with a vital
integrity. As both play and production develop, I'd like to hear less text
and see more texture in the non-verbal dimensions of human behaviour.
Even so, as an investigation into the human capacity for committing domestic,
suburban and urban atrocities, I find
Hate Crimes more effective than its
recently produced counterparts,
A Clockwork Orange (Silo) and
Bedbound (Bats). Rothwell is
definitely a playwright to watch.
- John Smythe,
National Business Review
The satirical newspaper The Onion sells a t-shirt bearing the legend,
"Stereotypes are a real time saver". If Paul Rothwell's dark and timely
comedy Hate Crimes has any sort of
straight moral, then perhaps that's it.
The twenty-three-year-old playwright has produced a work that scores a direct
hit to the bleeding heart of the new brand of right-on liberalism and forces
an audience accustomed to having its views propped up by simple, faux-agitprop
fare (like Badd Company's anti-Destiny, pro- um, flatting?
Bad Manor) and we-are-family
community events to call into question their own assumed convictions. At the
same time, it remains oddly apolitical, and can be easily digested by anyone
who believes that actual issues are
more complex and interesting than slogans. It shows a level of maturity
absent from most fringe-dwelling productions.
Fifteen-year-old Gareth Boyd (James Stewart, perfectly cast despite being
over twice Gareth's age) is a sensitive, awkward kid who's bullied at school
and ignored at home by his mother, Marlene (Erin Banks, who looks the part
despite being about a dozen years younger than Stewart). Marlene has left
Gareth's father and now devotes most of her time to working at the
photocopier's.
After a decent ribbing from Alex Greig's Felix (a school bully who sneers at
fags and gooks) and a brush-off from his preoccupied mother, Gareth decides
to kill himself, but fails and ends up a vegetable, confined to a wheelchair
and in need of constant care. As well as the solo mother, the school bully
and the debilitated ex-social reject, the cast features a gay music teacher,
a blue-collar white supremacist, a Chinese student and a professional
care-giver, who, like a walking Levin Council meeting, seems to stand for all
that is boring and necessary about community life in New Zealand. Kate
Fitzroy is superb in the part, employing just the right amount of exaggerated
concern and wilful ignorance.
In the play's early stages, the audience seemed ready to let their sympathies
lie with Gareth, his mother, the music teacher and Elliot, the impish Chinese
student with whom they live (Sonia Yee). After all, they're traditional
victims. Hayden, the gay Maori teacher (Laughton Kora in a highly camp but
highly credible performance) has even been up on paedophilic charges before,
for crying out loud. Just cos he's gay! It doesn't take long for the machinery
of fear and loathing Gareth has unintentionally put in place to whirr into
action, consuming everyone around him as he grunts, cackles and gibbers in
ignorance. That's when we get uncomfortable.
It may sound grim, but there are moments of real hilarity to be found in
Hate Crimes. At times, though, it was
difficult to say why the scenes the
opening night audience found so amusing were funny at all. Occasionally we
were laughing out of low-level shock and unease (it reminded me of how the
packed cinema I was in had giggled when Robert De Niro shot Bridget Fonda
in Jackie Brown). As well as these
dubious pleasures, straighter scenes are mined for comedy, and the characters'
costumes alone are able to raise small, slightly superior chuckles from the
trendier urbanites in the crowd. (And it was a crowd - a full house on
opening night.)
The set is sparse and functional (though
orange), and Joshua Judkins has a
mammoth job in the lighting box, as the play is made up of many disparate
scenes with different requirements. He's up to it. And whoever made the
decision to incorporate Pixies and Belle & Sebastian songs gets a thumbs-up
from from me.
In his dialogue, Rothwell chops between commonplace, confused New Zild
("You can't do the Haka, you faggot. It's for real men," explains Ace,
Hadleigh Walker's racist repairman, to Hayden) and heightened, ideological
oratory (as part of his punishment for bullying, Felix addresses the school
thus: "As privileged young white heterosexual males we can sometimes become
complacent about our situation in society, and we exclude, or relegate to
less significant positions, some who are also more than capable of
contributing."). On occasion, the two approaches merge to justify a
particular hatred or agenda, as in this pearl of talkback wisdom from Ace:
"Racism. Bigotry. They're just words hypocrites like him
made up to denigrate views they find
threatening. But what if our "prejudice" is born out of truth? What then?"
The writing rarely hits a false note, and it's easy to not only connect with
the characters themselves and the ideals they (often fleetingly) hold, but
also to feel the frustration of the playwright. "Be angry" may be the most
telling line in the play. In his profile in the Dominion Post the day after
opening night, Rothwell admitted to having a good deal of hate within him.
If his creations are anything to go by, then it doesn't really make a
difference where he chooses to direct it. I'm sure glad he put some of it
into this though.
- Jonathan Potts,
studentz.co.nz
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